Dr. Ralph Baric, on the latest This Week in Virology podcast detailed a hypothesis for why SARS-CoV-2 could be the birth of a new common-cold. If true, it could be insight into how the other endemic, common-cold-causing coronaviruses got their start in human populations many years ago- through ancient pandemics that had horrible disease similar to that of SARS, MERS & COVID-19.

The following is an excerpt from this article that details, summarizes & timestamps this fantastic podcast by the TWiV team, hosted by Vincent Raconiello, with guest Dr. Ralph Baric, a renowned expert in the study of coronaviruses, that was released yesterday. The following condenses the portions of the podcast dealing with the common-cold inception hypothesis presented by Dr. Baric on yesterday’s show. The numbers are the timestamps from where in the podcast these things were talked about (but seriously, just listen to it instead).

10:00 — Super-spreaders seem to be a phenomenon more common in emerging coronaviruses than influenza viruses… Is this is also a property of common-cold causing coronaviruses?

16:57 — No one knows how coronaviruses maintain themselves in human populations. They don’t rapidly mutate like Influenza where you have 130+ common types of it endemic in humans (there are ~4 coronaviruses endemic to humans)… There is a hypothesis that coronaviruses can cause acute infection when they first make the zoonotic jump to humans, which they leverage to become endemic with humans by causing only mild disease from then on.

48:18 — Humans have only defined these common-cold causing coronaviruses as ones causing mild disease in recent history. In reality they all originated in other animals at some point. Because of that, we do not know how severe the disease caused by them was when they first infected humans.