By Juan Tellez

The first thing to note is that the coronavirus is actually from a family of viruses that have been with us for a long time. There is not just one virus that has just started now. In fact the first identified human coronavirus was back in 1965, and it caused the common cold. Like a lot of other diseases this virus has mutated to be more dangerous.

This COVID-19 coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, as many people already know. This is also where the SARS epidemic broke out. SARS was originally in bats and then transferred to humans in one of the “wet” markets found around China. They are called wet because animals are live and then slaughtered right there in front of the customer so that they know it is fresh.

There was also some talk about the COVID-19 coming from pangolins, which is a cool-looking scaly anteater, (I will stick to hamburgers, thank you), because supposedly there weren’t any bats for sale in the wet market when the epidemic broke out. This is also why many believe, and there hasn’t been any way to disprove it, that this disease escaped from the Wuhan lab where they do disease research.

COVID just like SARS is now transmitted from person to person without being in contact with infected animals. That is why this has spread all around the world to be the worst pandemic in the twenty-first century.

According to WebMD, there are currently seven coronaviruses that can infect humans. SARS came out of China in 2002, where it spread to 28 other countries. MERS started in Saudi Arabia in 2012, and is less contagious than SARS, but more deadly.

These two diseases have killed less than a thousand people each, (which means that they are both less contagious than the current COVID-19 pandemic, and also more deadly.) That is a bad combination, and the reason that we are in the situation that we currently find ourselves in. More than 8,000 were infected by SARS and 774 died, in 2003 and then four more cases in 2004. There were only about 2,500 cases of MERS, but it killed 858. At the time of writing this there are over four million cases of COVID in the world and almost one and a half million, just in the United States. This is a much bigger issue.

While U.S. officials are still not certain where this came from, and everyone with any means is trying to find a solution to the current problem, the focus is still on China with their “wet” markets being the cause of other disease outbreaks, and the Wuhan lab where they work with viruses. It does not appear that this was intentional from the Chinese. What is certain is that this is a major issue for the world.

There has to be a way that humanity can prevent this from happening in the first place. Many people are suffering all around the world and there needs to be a way of stopping diseases before they get out of hand. That will take the cooperation of nations around the world. Cooperation before a problem exists is always hard to do.