A New Bug on the Block

Abstract

In December 2019, clusters of pneumonia cases started showing up in the Hubei region of China, especially in its largest city Wuhan. As these piled up, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ laboratories and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control started looking for the cause. This turned out to be a new virus, whose genetic sequence matched very closely with two coronaviruses isolated from bats in China in 2018.