SARS-CoV-2 has been appearing in government newscasts recently as scientists try to understand why the virus is so virulent. We had thought it was another term for the coronavirus plaguing us. We consulted with Wikipedia and now we understand how SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 are different, and why.
World Health Explains How SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 Are Different
The World Health Organization (WHO) scrambled to classify the new infectious disease as soon as China announced it. This would enable it to catalogue the reports that came streaming in, and make them available to other researchers. It followed the established convention of discriminating between a virus, and the disease it causes.
That in a nutshell explains how SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the chest disease) are different. The World Health Organization names viruses according to their genetic structure to facilitate and compare research. Whereas it names diseases with a view to facilitating prevention, infection control, and treatment of the symptoms.
World Health Organization Reasoning Behind the Names it Chose
The WHO named the new virus SARS-CoV-2 which is the short form of ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2’. That’s because it is a member of the same family as the virus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak.
However, that’s not the end of the explanation how SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 are different. The World Health Organization named the disease and its symptoms Coronavirus Infectious Disease 2019 (or Covid-19 for short) to discriminate it from the virus.
Moreover, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread throughout Asia (where SARS struck), the WHO took whatever options were available to limit panic. It adopted a policy for a while of referring to it as ‘the virus that causes Covid-2019’. Hence the confusion we experienced. However, we now know the difference and wished to share it with you.
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Preview Image: Electron Micrograph of SARS-CoV-2
