Corona is the Latin word for wreath, garland, crown, assembly, audience, surrounding army, besiegers. Corona virus resembles a wreath under an electron microscope.

Have you ever seen the movie Contagion? Well that movie explains the spread of diseases especially viruses and what vomitus is and what Patient Zero is.
A virus is not a living cell – a virus is an infectious particle that only has basic parts – it has something to hold everything inside (Capsule) with some DNA or RNA inside of it. Sometimes they even have an extra envelope around them. However they actually steal this envelope from their host cell when they exit their host cell, damaging the cell as they leave.
No one knows where viruses come from or evolved from. This is still a debate amongst scientists with a lot of theories but none that fit the picture of a virus. A virus is just a mobile genetic vehicle.

So how do viruses then continue if they are not even alive? They HAVE to invade their host to survive and they can only multiply in THEIR host cell. This is called an obligate parasite. Each virus can only recognise a narrow range of cells to call their host. When a virus enters a host cell they take over production of the cell to make more-viruses hundreds to millions of them– stopping normal production of the cell. These new viruses become full grown viruses that then exit their host cell damaging the cell as they leave, sometimes even grabbing parts of the cell membrane as they leave. The damage can cause the host cell to die. Then each of these mass produced mutated viruses are able to infect other host cells. However as we all know, when sudden acute mass production of anything occurs; the quality control is not always as good as it should be. This quality control is where a lot of problems occur. If a virus mutated during production -it might be able to infect a different or new host cell.

There are several viruses that start to infect humans that were never known to infect humans. These viruses are called “Emerging viruses”.
Where do these “Emerging viruses” come from? Well there are three known processes that contribute to this emergence. First as I have mentioned is bad quality control when the virus is replicating in its host cell causing altered or rather mutated viruses to be released. This is something that often occurs with Coronaviruses because their quality control is almost non-existent.
The second process where these emerging viruses come from is when they start to affect a completely different host – from animals to humans (so not necessarily a new virus- just a virus with a new coat on).

The third process where these emerging viruses come from is when it moves from a small isolated population to the rest of the world – let us take AIDS as an example – it was unnamed and ignored for several decades before it spread throughout the world because the isolated population could now get access to the rest of the more developed world.
In summary – emerging viruses are not ‘NEW” – rather they are viruses that have already existed but that mutated, spread to new hosts and spread to the rest of the world. So if a virus mutated when it was produced in a host cell and it leaves the host cell ready to infect a new host species and the host species was not present it cannot infect anything else and would have died. It is a numbers game – the more contact there is, the higher the chance for emerging viruses.

That is the problem that we have seen with the exotic food markets from China – the constant close contact between humans and animals in poor hygienic conditions with constant exposure to urine, faeces and sick animals – it was a ticking time bomb. Poor hygienic conditions and close contact in any circumstance is breeding ground for disease. If the host (humans) were not in contact with these animals – the virus that would have mutated anyway – would not have found a host and all of this could have been just a bad plot to a new Netflix movie.