Recent Scientific Research on Covid-19
If it interests anyone these are a few of the recent scientific findings...
It's known that Covid-19 shares over 80 percent of its DNA with SARS virus... However, a team of Chinese researchers found that, unlike SARS though, the novel Coronavirus has a section of genes that are absent from the SARS genome. In fact, they bear resemblance to genes found in HIV and Ebola. These genes may encode for a different pathway targeting the protein furin on human cells, which is how HIV and Ebola attack.
This could make Covid-19 up to 1,000 times better at binding to human cells than SARS.
Note this is similar to what a team of Indian researchers found about a month ago. They stated "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag”, suggesting that some HIV genes may have actually leapt into Covid-19, making it more contagious and therefore dangerous.
Another independent French study (peer reviewed) came to almost the same conclusions and also reported that The furin-like cleavage site in the S-protein of 2019-nCoV may have implications for the viral life cycle and pathogenicity of the Covid virus - and suggested that campaigns to develop anti-2019-nCoV therapeutics should include the evaluation of Furin inhibitors.
Note: Drugs do exist which target the Furin enzyme — drugs previously used in HIV treatments - and that's possibly the reason why the HIV drugs had some effects on the infection.