Talk:SARS-CoV-2

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The contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to COVID-19, broadly construed, which is a contentious topic. Please consult the procedures and edit carefully.

WikiProject COVID-19 consensus

WikiProject COVID-19 aims to add to and build consensus for pages relating to COVID-19. They have so far discussed items listed below. Please discuss proposed improvements to them at the project talk page.

General

Superseded by TfD October 2020 and later practice - consult regular {{Current}} guidance.

Refrain from using Worldometer (worldometers.info) as a source due to common errors being observed as noted on the Case Count Task Force common errors page. (April 2020, April 2020)

For infoboxes on the main articles of countries, use Wuhan, Hubei, China for the origin parameter. (March 2020)

"Social distancing" is generally preferred over "physical distancing". (April 2020, May 2020)

Page title

COVID-19 (full caps) is preferable in the body of all articles, and in the title of all articles/category pages/etc.(RM April 2020, including the main article itself, RM March 2021).

SARS-CoV-2 (exact capitalisation and punctuation) is the common name of the virus and should be used for the main article's title, as well as in the body of all articles, and in the title of all other articles/category pages/etc. (June 2022, overturning April 2020)

Map

There is no consensus about which color schemes to use, but they should be consistent within articles as much as possible. There is agreement that there should be six levels of shading, plus gray for areas with no instances or no data. (May 2020)

There is no consensus about whether the legend, the date, and other elements should appear in the map image itself. (May 2020)

For map legends, ranges should use fixed round numbers (as opposed to updating dynamically). There is no consensus on what base population to use for per capita maps. (May 2020)

To ensure you are viewing the current list, you may wish to purge this page.

This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

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Molecular Biology B‑class Top‑importance

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about SARS-CoV-2.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

Moves, mentions, and copied material

This article has previously been nominated to be moved. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination.

Discussions:

24 April 2020, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → SARS coronavirus 2, Withdrawn by nominator, not moved (permalink)
29 April 2020, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → COVID-19 virus, Speedy close, consensus to not move (permalink)
12 March 2021, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → SARS-CoV-2, Consensus to not move (permalink)

Older discussions:

22 January 2020, Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) → Wuhan coronavirus, Consensus against moving (permalink)
31 January 2020, Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) → 2019-nCoV, Consensus to move to "2019 novel coronavirus" (permalink)
9 February 2020, 2019 novel coronavirus → 2019 Novel coronavirus, Speedy close, not moved (permalink)
11 February 2020, 2019 novel coronavirus → SARS-CoV-2, Speedy close, no consensus (permalink)
18 February 2020, 2019 novel coronavirus → Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, Moved (permalink)
16 March 2020, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 → COVID-19 virus, WP:SNOW closed, not moved (permalink)

This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

Omer Benjakob (9 February 2020). "On Wikipedia, a fight is raging over coronavirus disinformation". Wired (magazine). Retrieved 9 February 2020. ... the article about the '2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak' was created on January 5, 2020. Four days later, a new article was spun off from it, dedicated solely to the 'Novel coronavirus' – officially known as 2019-nCoV. Yet another was created in February to detail the symptoms of the respiratory disease caused by the virus.
Mikael Thalen (24 March 2020). "Meet the Wikipedia editors fighting to keep coronavirus pages accurate". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 31 March 2020. Those pages include the Wikipedia article for the virus itself, known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, the disease it causes, COVID-19, and the ongoing global pandemic the coronavirus has caused.
Omer Benjakob (8 April 2020). "Why Wikipedia Is Immune to Coronavirus". Haaretz. Retrieved 10 April 2020. Asked by Haaretz to gauge the merits of the English-language article on the virus, Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, who heads the department of public health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, said he was 'pleasantly surprised by its quality.'

Text has been copied to or from this article; see the list below. The source pages now serve to provide attribution for the content in the destination pages and must not be deleted as long as the copies exist. For attribution and to access older versions of the copied text, please see the history links below.

Copied Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) (oldid, history) → 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease (diff) on 5 February 2020
Copied Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) (oldid, history) → 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease (diff) on 5 February 2020
Copied Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2#Strains and variants (oldid, history) → Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 variants (diff) on 23 December 2020

Section sizes

Section size for SARS-CoV-2 (19 sections)
Section name	Byte count	Section total
(Top)	8,777	8,777
Terminology	2,827	2,827
Infection and transmission	5,412	9,192
Asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission	2,321	2,321
Reinfection	1,459	1,459
Reservoir and origin	9,268	9,268
Phylogenetics and taxonomy	17,765	20,879
Phylogenetic tree	62	3,114
Variants	3,052	3,052
Virology	16	9,460
Virus structure	2,364	2,364
Genome	3,944	3,944
Replication cycle	3,136	3,136
Treatment and drug development	4,030	4,030
Epidemiology	4,336	4,336
See also	45	45
References	52,221	52,221
Further reading	1,644	1,644
External links	2,388	2,388
Total	125,067	125,067

NOTE: It is recommended to link to this list in your edit summary when reverting, as:
[[Talk:SARS-CoV-2#Current consensus|current consensus]] item [n]
To ensure you are viewing the current list, you may wish to purge this page.

01. There is consensus that the terms "Wuhan virus" or "China virus" should not be used in the Lead of the article. The terms and their history can be discussed in the body of the article. (April 2020)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 29 September 2021

This edit request to Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

X... Coronaviruses infect humans, other mammals, and avian species, including livestock and companion animals.

Y... Coronaviruses infect humans, other mammals, including livestock and companion animals, and avian species.

NOTE: This is a trivial edit. The string 'livestock and companion animals' relates to 'other mammals', not 'avian species'. Cheers. Kevbo (talk) 04:09, 29 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Done ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 10:53, 29 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Laos' bats pre print

Why are we allowing the use of the Laos bats preprint? It was inserted in this edit . I suggest we remove it until it passes peer review. Forich (talk) 04:43, 9 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, we need to at least wait for it to be peer reviewed, if not waiting for a secondary source. Bakkster Man (talk) 12:17, 9 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I would agree. Although we do already have secondary sources about this: [1] (among others). I would just rather wait for the PRIMARY to be peer reviewed before jumping to use any secondary sources. The good news is that it's under consideration and likely fast tracked at a Nature-family journal, so this interim shouldn't last long. — Shibbolethink ^(♔ ^♕) 17:57, 9 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki link to viral shedding

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

In the second paragraph of the section titled “Infection and transmission,” please make the text “RNA shedding” into a wiki link that points to Viral shedding.

Tylercrompton (talk) 23:50, 11 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Done ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 10:50, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Mad props to all contributors

I love how roughly half the length of this article comprises carefully cited and documented references. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this article; every Wikipedia article should be this good —PowerPCG5 (talk) 09:35, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

NIH grant

I'm not an expert on this subject, so I cannot judge the completeness and veracity of this report from the US government itself. I leave it to others to decide if a digest of this should be included in the article, or if a footnote should be added.

The expert summary by a geneticist: https://merogenomics.ca/blog/en/145/Understanding-the-Risk-of-Bat-Coronavirus-Emergence-a-Merogenomics-NIH-grant-review

The actual documents from the NIH: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989-understanding-risk-bat-coronavirus-emergence-grant-notice access seems faster here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989/understanding-risk-bat-coronavirus-emergence-grant-notice.pdf

The actual document is 528 pages, but you can start by doing a search for the 24 occurrences of hACE2, reading the accompanying paragraphs, and seeing if you feel it worth your time to delve deeper.

My understanding is that, if true, the USA's NIH sponsored contractor EcoHealth and its principal investigator Dr. Peter Daszak to create versions of bat corona viruses that can infect cells via human ACE2 receptors (hACE2 receptors). This was an outgrowth of an innocent experiment to see if there were wild bat corona viruses that can infect humans.

The hACE2 work was apparently done in Wuhan, China.

Presumably the release was totally accidental. (Possibly, the lab was certified as BCL3 instead of BCL4, as it should have been for airborne viruses lethal to humans.)

I'm not an expert on this subject, so I cannot judge the completeness and veracity of this report from the US government itself. I leave it to others to decide if a digest of this should be included in the article, or if a footnote should be added. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:3D09:A57B:9870:C550:BE5:2934:91E7 (talk) 05:07, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

1) we do not write encyclopedia articles based on primary sources (such as opinion blogs or grant requests) 2) This is clearly the grant referred to here ("The alliance's grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, titled "Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence," was launched in 2014 and renewed for 5 years in 2019 after receiving an outstanding peer-review score. "); and clearly it's nothing new, and the section title is misleading. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 05:14, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note below diagram is wrong.

It is requested that an edit be made to the extended-confirmed-protected redirect at Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. (edit · history · last · links · protection log)

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The diagram depicting the structure of SARS-COVID-19 has an error in the note beneath the diagram. It claims the picture is an “atom”. It is a virus made of molecules. 2600:100C:B017:9372:C27:BC92:5330:9DE3 (talk) 13:00, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]