COVID-19 And SARS-COV-2 Infection And Virulence: Hypothesis I

Abstract

SARS-COV-2 is the etiologic agent of COVID-19. There is currently no effective means of preventing infections by SARS-COV-2, except through restriction of population movement and contact. An understanding of the origin, evolution and biochemistry (molecular biology) of SARS-COV-2 is a prerequite to its control. There is no definitive answer as to the origin of SARS-COV-2. The evolution of SARS-COV-2 can be gleaned from a comparative study of its infectivity and virulence in different populations and environments. From an analysis of the infectivity and virulence of SARS-COV-2 in different parts of the world, it is submitted that there is no correlation between infectivity and virulence of SARS-COV-2. It is therefore hypothesized that SARS-COV-2 may be a rapidly mutating virus and identification of SARS-COV-2 strain(s) that has/have increased virulence is essential in the formulation of any effective vaccine or prophylactic that targets SARS-COV-2.

Journal

Title: ScienceOpen Preprints

Publisher: ScienceOpen

Publication date (Electronic preprint): 10 April 2020

Affiliations

[1 ] Nachbraht Biomedical Research Institute

Article

DOI: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-.PPXVKPX.v1

License:

This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .