by Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

In early December, a few people in the city of Wuhan in the Hubei province of China began falling sick after going to a local seafood market. They experienced symptoms like cough, fever, and shortness of breath, and even complications related to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The immediate diagnosis was pneumonia, but the exact cause was unexplained. What caused this new outbreak? Is it the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV? Is it the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV?

As it turns out, scientists had undertaken a study to identify this virus in December after analyzing the first few cases. This study is now published in Chinese Medical Journal and the identity of the virus has been established—it is a completely new virus, closely related to the bat SARS-like CoV. Dr. Jianwei Wang (Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Institute of Pathogen Biology), lead researcher on the study, states,”Our paper has established the identity of the bat-origin CoV that was unknown until now.”

In this study, scientists from renowned research institutes in China, such as the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Institute of Pathogen Biology, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, and Peking Union Medical College, jointly discovered and identified the new CoV—the main culprit of the Wuhan outbreak—by next generation sequencing (NGS). They focused on five patients admitted to Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan, most of whom were workers in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. These patients had high fever, cough, and other symptoms, and were initially diagnosed to have pneumonia, but of an unknown cause. Some patients’ condition rapidly worsened to ARDS; one even died. Dr. Wang says, “Chest x-rays of the patients showed some hazy opacities and consolidations, which are typical of pneumonia. However, we wanted to find out what caused the pneumonia, and our subsequent experiments revealed the exact cause—a new CoV that was not known before.”

For the study, the scientists used bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid samples taken from the patients (BAL is a procedure in which sterile fluid is transferred to the lungs through a bronchoscope and then collected for analysis).