Employees of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases received a sample of the new coronavirus, which already infected nearly 65 thousand people, from a patient from the United States.
American scientists from the Rocky Mountains Laboratory of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Hamilton, Montana published a series of new images of 2019 coronavirus disease taken with scanning and transmission electron microscopes.
Samples of coronavirus isolated from a patient in the United States were provided by Emmy de Wit, Head of the Molecular Pathogenesis Department at NIAID, which is involved in research into the nature of the disease and in developing the vaccine. Then the microscope Elizabeth Fisher received the images, and the department of visual medicine in the laboratory digitized them.
According to the researchers, in its structure, the coronavirus that originated in China resembles the zoonotic Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS), cases of which occurred in different countries from 2012 to 2015, and SARS (Sars) – from which, 774 people died in 2002-2003, the outbreak also began in China.
“This is not surprising: the spikes on the surface of the coronaviruses give this virus family the name: corona in Latin means“ corona, ”and most coronaviruses will have such crowns around them,” the NIAID staff explained in their blog post.
This week, the World Health Organization hosted a two-day global forum in Geneva, which was attended by over 400 experts from around the world. The event discussed not only the spread of a new coronavirus disease on the planet or the successes in the development of the vaccine (it will be ready only in 12-18 months).
Among other things, the head of WHO, Tedros Adhan Gebreyesus, announced the assignment of an official name to the virus from China – Covid-19 (Co – corona, Vi – virus, D – disease, 19 – reference to 2019, when the first case of the disease was recorded). In addition, representatives of the organization recommended not identifying the new coronavirus with both pneumonia and, in general, with acute respiratory diseases (ARI).
Formerly an American scientist and WHO expert declared that Covid-19 is capable of infecting two-thirds of all people on the planet.
