| dc.description.abstract | This Editorial introduces 10 articles published in a Special Issue highlighting human
coronavirus (hCoV) research on the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002. Only with the SARS outbreak was the
pandemic potential of hCoVs acknowledged. HCoV-OC43 (Tyrrell and Bynoe, 1966),
HCoV-229E (Hamre and Procknow, 1966), HCoV-NL63 (Van Der Hoek et al., 2004),
and HCoV-HKU1 (Woo et al., 2005) are endemic in the human population and are
mainly associated with mild, self-limiting “common cold” illnesses annually. The burden
of respiratory tract infections, caused by the four “common-cold” hCoVs, is increased in
patients with chronic co-morbidities or clinical risk factors including young children, the
elderly and immunocompromised (Van Der Hoek, 2007). On the other hand, the three
know pathogenic hCoVs, SARS-CoV (Drosten et al., 2003; Peiris et al., 2003), Middle
East Respiratory Syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) (Zaki et al., 2012), and SARS-CoV-2
(Zhou et al., 2020a,b), cause severe respiratory syndromes and result in high morbidities
and mortalities, especially in the elderly (Chen et al., 2020). | en_US |
