A deadly version of the Coronavirus has been detected in South Africa-NeoCov, and scientists from China’s Wuhan lab have reportedly warned that it has a high fatality rate and also high transmission.
According to a report by Russian news agency Sputnik, the NeoCov virus is associated with the MERS-CoV virus that was discovered in the middle-eastern countries in 2012-15. While NeoCoV was discovered in a bat population in South Africa and has only been known to spread among these animals, a new unpeered study published as a preprint on the bioRxiv website discovered that NeoCoV and its close relative PDF-2180-CoV can infect humans.
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The report also cited that the Chinese researchers have found that the mortality rate in the NeoCov virus is very high – ‘one in every three infected individuals’. The Vector research center is aware of the data obtained by Chinese researchers on the NeoCoV coronavirus. ‘At the moment, the issue is not the emergence of a new coronavirus capable of actively spreading among humans’, the Russian State Virology and Biotechnology Research Center said in a statement, adding that the potential risks outlined needed to be studied and probed further.
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According to researchers from Wuhan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics, only one mutation is required for the virus to infiltrate human cells. The research findings stated that the novel coronavirus poses a risk because it binds to the ACE2 receptor differently than the coronavirus pathogen. As a result, neither antibodies nor protein molecules produced by people with respiratory diseases or who have been immunised can protect against NeoCoV.
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