It’s a deadly list, starting with the H1N1 “swine” influenza in 2009, chikungunya in 2014, and Zika in 2015. Ebola fever has burned in large parts of Africa for the past six years. In addition, there are seven different known coronaviruses that can infect humans. SARS-CoV spilled over from an animal host, likely a civet cat, in 2002–03, and caused a near pandemic before disappearing. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus jumped from camels to people in 2012, but never found a way to spread efficiently among humans and died out quickly. Now we have SARS-CoV-2, the virus that
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