What is the Coronavirus

What is the coronavirus COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 SARS?

Part 1: What is the coronavirus (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2)

Let me start on what is the coronavirus. You've seen a lot of names coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 SARS and they're all in a sense mean the exact same thing, this virus is an RNA virus what I mean by that the genetic signature inside this virus that little curly is made of an RNA that can reproduce, but most importantly the virus has on its surface envelope or capsule and then you see the spikes and the spikes form a crown and that's why it's called coronavirus.

In 2019 it created this disease in China and that's what COVID-19 was the first name coronavirus disease in 2019 COVID-19 and now the World Health Organization has created an official name this is the latest scientific name SARS-CoV-2.

Why the name (SARS-Cov-2)?

Why SARS-CoV-2 Because this is the second generation daughter virus of SARS and why is that important to us well it's given us a head start it's given the scientists a head start since 2003 2004 2005 to fully understand this family of coronaviruses specifically SARS and now SARS-CoV-2, what's exciting about that is we now have in our fingertips supercomputing genomics by informatics that wasn't as advanced even in 2003 and this is now allowing us to understand how contagious is gonna coronavirus because sadly this mutation has allowed SARS-CoV-2 to become a thousand times more effective than that of SARS and that is the fear, the fear is SARS was an endemic limited in it scale and scope but now SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic.

How does this virus enter your body?

So the question that we need to understand is how does this enter your body what does this do how does it affect this CEL how does it get picked the lung and what organs does it affect I think this is a opportunity for us to take adifferent lens of understanding the host effects rather than just the virus itself and if we look at that host effects we now truly have a shot like trying to block it and block the ability to get to SARS so firstly is an infected person has the ability to contaminate 2.6 other patients and how does that happen.

Well it's droplets and this nanoparticle of a virus forms droplets and these droplets can go on surfaces and then go into your hand the important fact is that your hand is now a vector we'll come back to how we can use that fact to our advantage and kill the virus but the lungs what happens inside the cell, well this virus has now hijacked this receptor in our body called the ACE 2 receptor this receptor is on bloodvessels this receptors on kidney and even on heart but most importantly on the what we call the alveolar cells of the lung it's in a very important receptor called ace 2 because it's there in your body to protect your lung tissue from injury what has happened is as a virus through its spikes has figured out a way to interact with that receptor and use that receptor to dock.

The virus goes on now to take advantage of the cell itself and use the cell as a factory it's now taken on what we call taking the RNA inside the virus itself it breaks it up and remarkably takes the what we call the Golgi apparatus the machinery of the human cell to reproduce itself and repackage and in so doing it propagates so this is the issue of how the virus actually regenerates and sheds now we are full circle because that shedding of that positive charge patient has the ability to contaminate others and the opportunity however to stop not just unfortunately shedding but stop that propagation is what containment is all about.