The two genuinely interesting items from the research are that it uses a yet-to-be identified means to enter the host's cell. The other being that it can still infect any of the probable original hosts of the virus, even though that has not been previously documented in SARS.
Virus' being able to infect different species is not that new or note worthy and I believe the title of the article is therefore poorly thought-out and misleading. It's not even new or noteworthy for SARS which had the ability to infect multiple species.
I found it to be a riveting story.
I understand that hCoV is a category of virus, but this strikes me as an unusual name. If this becomes a larger problem, people are not going to be calling it hCoV-EMC. hCoV would be incorrect, so would they rather people call it EMC and associate the name of the virus with the name of the medical facility that named it? Nobody called SARS SARS-hCoV, they called it SARS.
It just strikes me as an interesting name choice, and perhaps a bit narcissistic on the behalf of the research facility (not that narcissism isn't running rampant through science anyway).
(I'm never going outside again lol)
