On January 9 of this year, Chinese state media reported that a team of researchers led by Xu Jianguo had identified the pathogen behind a mysterious outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan as a novel coronavirus. Although the virus was soon after named 2019-nCoV, and then renamed SARS-CoV-2, it remains commonly known simply as the coronavirus. While that moniker has been catapulted into the stratosphere of public attention, it’s somewhat misleading: Not only is it one of many coronaviruses out there, but you’ve almost certainly been infected with members of the family long before SARS-CoV-2’s emergence in late 2019.
Coronaviruses take their name from the distinctive spikes with rounded tips that decorate their surface, which reminded virologists of the appearance of the sun’s atmosphere, known as its corona. Various coronaviruses infect numerous species, but the first human coronaviruses weren’t discovered until the mid-1960s. “That was sort of the golden days, if you will, of virology, because at that time the technology became available to grow viruses in the laboratory, and to study viruses in the laboratory,” says University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center pediatrician Jeffrey Kahn, who studies respiratory viruses. But the two coronaviruses that were identified at the time, OC43 and 229E, didn’t elicit much research interest, says Kahn, who wrote a review on coronaviruses a few years after the SARS outbreak of 2003. “I don’t believe there was a big effort to make vaccines against these because these were thought to be more of a nuisance than anything else.”
The viruses cause typical cold symptoms such as a sore throat, cough, and stuffy nose, and they seemed to be very common; one early study estimated that 3 percent of respiratory illnesses in a children’s home in Georgia over seven years in the 1960s had been caused by OC43, and a 1986 study of children and adults in northern Italy found that it was rare to come across a subject who did not have antibodies to that virus (an indicator of past infection).
Coronaviruses’ mild-mannered reputation changed with the SARS outbreak. Although related to OC43 and 229E, SARS-CoV was far deadlier, killing about 10 percent of people it infected—a total of 774 worldwide, according to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. While it’s still unclear exactly where SARS-CoV came from, similar viruses were later found in bats, and some studies suggested the virus could have jumped to humans via an intermediary such as civets. …
