A new coronavirus with the potential to spread among humans has been discovered by Chinese researchers.
A team led by virologist Shi Zhengli, known as ‘Batwoman’ for her work on coronaviruses, detected the new virus, HKU5-CoV-2, in bats in China.
HKU5-CoV-2 is similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked the global Covid-19 pandemic, and has the potential to infect people because it infiltrates human cells the same way Covid does.
The new virus has a higher potential than other coronaviruses of infecting people because of the way it binds to human cells called ACE2 – the ones Covid uses to infect people.
In experiments carried out in the lab, the scientists analyzed the virus and found it was able to infect human cell cultures in the human organ models.
The research was conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the center of the lab-leak theory, which claims Covid-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab and accidentally leaked to the public.
The scientists published their research in the journal Cell, and said: ‘Bat merbecoviruses, which are phylogenetically related to MERS-CoV, pose a high risk of spillover to humans, either through direct transmission or facilitated by intermediate hosts.’
The research team was led by virologist Shi Zhengli, known as ‘Batwoman’ for her work on coronaviruses
While there are hundreds of coronaviruses in the wild, only a few can infect humans, including SARS, SARS-CoV-2 and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).
The new HKU5-CoV-2 virus is a coronavirus belonging to the merbecovirus group and is closely related to the MERS virus.
MERS is a contagious respiratory illness spread from animals to humans and from human to human. It causes fever, cough, shortness of breath, diarrhea and vomiting, and can be fatal in severe cases.
Only two patients in the US have ever tested positive for MERS – both in May 2014 -and each case was linked to travel from the Middle East. There is no vaccine against the virus.
Merbecoviruses have been detected in minks and pangolins – the animal believed to be the intermediary for Covid between bats and humans.
This, researchers wrote, ‘suggests frequent cross-species transmission of these viruses between bats and other animal species.
