Madison DeGrezia
Professor Vejdemo-Johansson
HON 223
18 October 2021
Coronavirus: A New Disease or One From the Past?
After thorough research and skimming through the recent articles published on the New York Post, “Coronaviruses have been around a lot longer than you think, study says” by Kathianne Boniello caught my interest. The Covid-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the world with a variety of symptoms that range from mild to severe cases. This disease has taken a toll on society and left people with many unanswered questions. Many people questioned where it came from and how it managed to spread so quickly. A vaccine was urgently needed, however Covid-19 mutated creating a new strand of the virus that medical officials lacked the knowledge of. Despite the common belief that the coronavirus is an upcoming disease that originated in Wuhan, China and spread to several other countries across the world, study shows that the virus may have been around much longer than we all believed.
The New York Post article written by Boniello based its findings off of the data published in the peer reviewed journal posted on “Current Biology”, “An ancient viral epidemic involving host coronavirus interacting genes more than 20,000 years ago in East Asia” by Yassine Souilmi, M. Elise Lauterbur, Ray Tobler, Nevan J. Krogan, Kirill Alexandrov, and David Enard. The article focuses on the coronavirus pandemic and the identification of past epidemics through the response and adaptation of genomes. Researchers used evolutionary information to trace the immune responses of the infected hosts and utilized this information to help predict future breakouts of diseases that can affect humanity. The study employed the STARS Method, which is a structured technique to approach unanswered questions and draw valid conclusions. In this study, the selection signals were analyzed to see if a set of VIPs were present that interacted with the coronavirus pandemic. The behavior of the VIPs were the main focus due to the protein interactions illustrating how a virus can hijack and infect a host. Based on the 35 interactions of proteins that were studied, 24 of them, approximately 73%, were verified to be CoV-VIPs. The data provided further evidence that a past epidemic in East Asia could have existed, which possessed similar protein interactions to the viral coronavirus outbreak.
The published New York Post article and the research paper share some similarities, however there are discrepancies that set them apart from each other. Both suggest the possibility of a virus in East Asia, similar to the coronavirus outbreak, spreading and infecting our ancestors. Nevertheless, the academic paper discusses how it is possible for a viral infection to exist in the past that was similar to the coronavirus, but was not identical to the one that is impacting society today. The paper rather focuses on selection signals that possess a set of VIPs that were verified to be CoV-VIPs. Therefore, the paper focuses on the interactions between the proteins and proves that their behavior is similar to how the coronavirus attached to the cell’s in the infected host’s body and replicated itself. The New York Post article was condensed and provided very little background for the study conducted. It failed to specifically explain how researchers were able to conclude that a virus similar to covid infected people in the past and enabled the genes to adapt. The article lacked the scientific evidence that strengthened the researchers’ arguments and instead provided a condensed version of the study that did not include all of the important information that was mentioned in the study. The abstract and the New York Post article were in agreement with one another for the most part, but the abstract was more in detail with how a past virus had similar interactions to how the coronavirus reacted with the host. This eye opening revelation provided researchers with evolutionary evidence that could assist in understanding and predicting future outbreaks of viruses across the world. The purpose of an abstract and a New York Times article is to grab the audience’s attention and intrigue them to read further. This explains why articles in NY Times have attention-grabbing titles that catch the eye of readers right off the bat. To sum up, the news article briefly introduces a breakthrough in science, in contrast to the research paper that provides insight on the scientific study conducted by experts.
Work Cited
Boniello, Kathianne. “Coronaviruses Have Been around a Lot Longer than You Think, Study Says.” New York Post, New York Post, 27 June 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/06/27/coronaviruses-have-been-around-longer-than-you-think-study/.
Souilmi, Yassine, et al. “An ancient viral epidemic involving host coronavirus interacting genes more than 20,000 years ago in East Asia.” Current Biology 31.16 (2021): 3504-3514.
