Opinion | After 1 million deaths, Covid-19 is still a mystery and experts have burning questions
- Experts have published more than 3,500 articles on the coronavirus but they’ve merely skimmed the surface of all there is to know
- Questions remain, such as how to live safely with Covid-19 and the prospects for a vaccine
On January 13, we published “Mystery China pneumonia outbreak likely caused by new human coronavirus” by Connor Bamford, a virologist at Queen’s University Belfast. Since then, we have published more than 3,500 articles on the now not-so-novel coronavirus, officially named Sars-CoV-2. Despite this huge output from the world’s leading experts, we have merely skimmed the surface of all there is to know about this perplexing pathogen. So much remains a mystery.
At this important juncture, we asked several experts from different fields what their burning question about the coronavirus is. Here is what they said:
How did Sars-CoV-2 enter the human population?
Connor Bamford, Research Fellow, Virology, Queen’s University Belfast
Since the original investigations into the beginnings of Sars coronaviruses in 2002, horseshoe bats in Southeast Asia have been implicated as the reservoir hosts, and a virus (RmYN02) that is extremely similar to Sars-CoV-2 has already been found in bats. However, similar viruses have also been found in pangolins, raising the possibility that Sars-CoV-2 may not have jumped directly from a bat.
