New Delhi: ‘NeoCov.’ This is the name of a new type of coronavirus in South Africa. According to scientists from China’s Wuhan, it has a high death and transmission rate.
According to a report by the Russian news agency Sputnik, the NeoCov virus is actually not new. Associated with the MERS-CoV virus, it was discovered in outbreaks in Middle Eastern countries in 2012 and 2015 and is similar to the SARS-CoV-2, which causes coronavirus in humans.
NeoCoV was discovered in a bat population in South Africa and has only been known to spread among them. But 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, the report added.
Researchers from Wuhan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics say……
- Only one mutation is required for the virus to infiltrate human cells.
- The novel coronavirus poses a risk because it binds to the ACE2 receptor differently than the coronavirus pathogen.
- Neither antibodies nor protein molecules produced by people with respiratory diseases or who have been immunised can protect against NeoCoV.
- NeoCoV carries the potential combination of MERS-high CoV’s mortality rate (one in every three infected persons dies) and the current SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus’s high transmission rate.