• Question: do you know any facts about corona virus?

    Asked by anon-243312 to Mick, Pan-ngum, Natalia, Manjit, Filipe, Bruce on 10 Mar 2020. This question was also asked by anon-243289, anon-243889, anon-243415.
    • Photo: Michael Schubert

      Michael Schubert answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I do! Feel free to ask me anything you’d like to know. Here are a few of my favourite facts about the coronavirus:
      – There are lots of different coronaviruses. Some of the viruses that cause ordinary colds are coronaviruses.
      – Coronaviruses got their name from the word “corona,” which means crown. Under a microscope, they are covered in little spikes made out of protein, which makes the viruses look like they have a crown.
      – The 2019 novel coronavirus has an official name. It’s called SARS-CoV-2. That doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue!
      – Lots of coronaviruses start in animals and then move to humans. SARS-CoV-2 started in bats, which have very strong immune systems, and then moved to us.
      – The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is very good at infecting people – but, luckily, most people who get it will only feel like they have a cough, cold, or flu. It can be scary to hear about on television or read about in newspapers, but most people who get the disease will be fine.

    • Photo: Natalia Brodaczewska

      Natalia Brodaczewska answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      Like all viruses, coronavirus is very tiny – it is about 100 times smaller than a human skin cell.
      It doesn’t have any DNA but instead it has another type of molecule that we call RNA – ribonucleic acid. It’s genome (all the genetic code that it has) is quite big for a virus but much smaller than a human one – our genetic code is about million times longer than that of coronavirus.
      One interesting fact about viruses in general is that we don’t really know if we should call them living organisms or not. They are not able to grow or make more viruses by themselves but they’re completely dependent on other organisms like humans to do things for them. The way the viruses work is that they break into a cell and use the cell’s proteins to make more viruses and spread to other cells. So they’re kind of like computer viruses – they sneak into your computer and use it to do things that you didn’t want it to do and may eventually end up breaking it.

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