Three months into the pandemic, here’s how likely the coronavirus is to infect people
“This is a new virus that has landed in the human community. We are a brand-new, naive population. We’re kind of sitting ducks, right?” said Ilhem Messaoudi, a virologist at the University of California at Irvine. … At the genetic level, the new virus is not terribly different from the SARS virus that emerged in China in 2002 … “We thought we cured it. We thought the virus disappeared. Well, the virus didn’t disappear, did it?” said Michael Buchmeier, a UC Irvine virologist who has studied coronaviruses for three decades. … “Social distancing is building speed bumps so that we can slow the spread of the virus. We have to respect the speed bumps,” Messaoudi said.
