我们看到了病毒, 但我们不知道它从哪里来，也不知道它是如何来的

自年底以来 2019, 第七种人类冠状病毒 SARS-CoV-2 (SARS-CoV-2) 已感染超过 80 全球百万人, 超过 1.77 数百万人失去生命. 疫情爆发之初, 即使是训练有素的病毒学家也无法立即判断情况, 和的影子 “不明原因肺炎” 笼罩人类社会一段时间.

In the face of such new infectious diseases, scientists charge ahead and shoulder the heavy responsibility of finding out the “real murderer”. “此时, competent scientists are needed to make judgments, draw conclusions, and report them to relevant departments.” In an interview with a reporter from The Paper (www.thepaper.cn), a domestic virologist stressed that it is especially important to have scientists with this ability and responsibility in the early stage of the epidemic.

This is not an easy task. In April 2020, after the outbreak, Susan R. Weiss, an American microbiologist who has been studying coronavirus for 40 年, published an article in the American Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), feeling that when she first entered the field of coronavirus, there were far fewer coronavirus researchers.

In the autumn of 1980, the first International Conference on Coronavirus was held in Wü rzburg, 德国. 当时, Weiss was invited to attend the conference, 以及关于 60 people attended the conference, almost the global researchers in this field at that time. “Every pandemic like SARS or COVID-19 will prompt researchers to flood into this field. With the disappearance of the virus, the number of researchers will decrease. So far, the scientific community is still full of unknowns about human coronavirus. ”

Compared with SARS in 2003, the time for scientists to find out the real murderer is much shorter. In the first few days of January this year, the Chinese research team sequenced the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) samples of patients and obtained partial or complete genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2. 在一月 9, the results of pathogen identification were reported to the World Health Organization; On January 12th, China registered the genome sequence information of the new coronavirus in the global influenza shared database, and informed the international community about the genome virus data.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in November 2020 that in the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak, China only identified the pathogen in seven days and developed diagnostic reagents in two days, creating the shortest record for human beings to know a new infectious disease.