Coronaviruses are a major public health concern, especially right now, in the middle of the “2019nCoV” outbreak. Understanding their mechanism is the core of Chris Mok’s current research.
The HKU-Pasteur team leader, and his colleagues from the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease, Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University and the Institute of Infectious Disease, just published on the HCoV-NL63 coronavirus that arose in 2018 in Guangzhou.
They show that a previously innocuous coronavirus, NL63, was mutating and being responsible of severe acute respiratory diseases. Twenty-three hospitalized children were confirmed to be HCoV-NL63 positive, and most of whom were hospitalized with severe pneumonia or acute bronchitis.
Wang Y, Li X, Liu W, Gan M, Zhang L, Wang J, Zhang Z, Zhu A, Li F, Sun J, Zhang 1, Zhuang Z, Luo J, Chen D, Qiu S, Zhang L, Xu D, Mok CKP, Zhang F, Zhao J, Zhou R, Zhao J
PMID: 31996093 DOI: 10.1080/22221751.2020.1717999
