Coronavirus Questions Answered: Spreading, Mutating And Killing It

What are your questions about the coronavirus?

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Kiana asked: Is it true the virus mutates, or is it deadly on its own?

Dr. Amy Edwards, an infectious disease physician at University Hospitals, said she’s seen reports out of China – where a majority of mortality has been – that patients come down with respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS.

“Basically what happens is you get an infection in your lungs, and then you have a very severe inflammatory reaction to that infection and you get what we call diffuse lung injury or diffuse lung response,” she said. “My understanding is that’s what’s killing a lot of people.”

There have also been some cases of pneumonia, she said, but there’s a lot we don’t know about the virus, since it’s new to humans.

That’s something a lot of people have questions about, like 17-year-old high school student Lorenzo, who wondered if the virus was new, since Lysol cans say it can kill coronavirus.

Lysol responded to this claim on its website, saying this outbreak is a new strain of the disease.

This specific virus is new to humans, Edwards said.

“Coronavirus, as a family of viruses, is something we have known about for a very long time,” she said.

Human coronavirus is one of the causes of the common cold. But this strain of the virus isn’t human coronavirus.

“Most likely it appears that it might be a bat coronavirus that has crossed over, probably via another animal, into humans,” she said.

That’s part of the problem, Edwards said, because humans don’t have any natural immunity to this strain of the virus.