The coronavirus is an airborne virus that primarily infects a mammal or a bird’s upper respiratory and gastrointestinal tract. First reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, the aforementioned virus has infected people in China. As sick people from Wuhan traveled, the illness also spread in other countries, including the United States.
Belonging to the same family as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, which have killed hundreds of people almost two decades ago, the World Health Organization has named the newly discovered coronavirus as 2019-nCoV.
The question is, where did this come from? Some scientists say that the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra could be the original source of this virus.
More details about this over at Discover.
(Image Credit: Thomas Brown/ Wikimedia Commons)