Disclaimer*: The articles shared under 'Your Voice' section are sent to us by contributors and we neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of any facts stated below. Parhlo will not be liable for any false, inaccurate, inappropriate or incomplete information presented on the website. Read our disclaimer.
Disclaimer*: The articles shared under ‘Your Voice’ section are sent to us by contributors and we neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of any facts stated below. Parhlo will not be liable for any false, inaccurate, inappropriate or incomplete information presented on the website. Read our disclaimer.
The world is echoing with the sounds of the novel coronavirus disease. The beam of the pandemic has almost sliced all the continents. Big affluent cities like Paris have gone back to look like in the 1960s. People like Senator Rehman Malik and molecular biologist Tina Hesman Saey are all writing about the coronavirus if it is a bioweapon or not.
After searching the internet, which by far is the most popular source of information about the pandemic circling the globe, some say it is humanmade, and some say it is natural. It might sound astonishing, but coronaviruses are not new.
What is coronavirus?
To be precise, there are hundreds of coronaviruses, and only seven of them can affect humans. Four of these coronaviruses are mild, while the other three can cause severe illness. These are mostly believed to originate from animals, for example, SARS CoV 2 started from bats and MERS CoV had started from camels.
The virus’s genetic look and making shows that it has unusual features, which match those of a type of scaly anteaters (the animals that feed on termites and have a long and sticky tongue), called Pangolins, according to a report published in Natural Medicine by Kristian Anderson and his team.
Source: onlineindus
Wuhan, the city of China where COVID-19 (COVID-19 is the name of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus)) began, has an institute of virology. That is one reason people started thinking the virus was engineered in that laboratory. But another virologist (person who studies viruses), Robert Garry at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA, researched and found after studying the virus that it did not leak from that laboratory. He also says it has features that cannot be humanmade. There is a seafood market in Wuhan where people sell smuggled Pangolins. As told above, a group of evolutionary biologists found the virus had special anatomy that proved it came from pangolin.
Coronavirus and fake news
A 2011 movie “Contagion” is believed to be an analogy of the current COVID-19. But, it’s not. The movie was about another type of fictional virus disease that bats had spread. However, the novel coronavirus disease is different.
There was a video of the dictator Saddam Hussain, where he was warning his commanders about the coronavirus. The video is fake. As told above, coronaviruses are large in number, and some of them are mild. I think whosoever dubbed the video did not know the difference between other coronaviruses and the novel one. Besides, he is talking with calm expressions, not as if he is talking about something panicky. Let us not spread fake news and contribute to making the world a fearless and safe place.
The writer, Mujtaba Hassan, is the youngest writer at Parhlo. He is only 11 years old.
