Comparative review of respiratory diseases caused by coronaviruses and influenza A viruses during epidemic season

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to sweep the world, causing infection of millions and death of hundreds of thousands. The respiratory disease that it caused, COVID-19 (stands for coronavirus disease in 2019), has similar clinical symptoms with other two CoV diseases, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome (SARS and MERS), of which causative viruses are SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, respectively. These three CoVs resulting diseases also share many clinical symptoms with other respiratory diseases caused by influenza A viruses (IAVs). Since both CoVs and IAVs are general pathogens responsible for seasonal cold, in the next few months, during the changing of seasons, clinicians and public heath may have to distinguish COVID-19 pneumonia from other kinds of viral pneumonia. This is a discussion and comparison of the virus structures, transmission characteristics, clinical symptoms, diagnosis, pathological changes, treatment and prevention of the two kinds of viruses, CoVs and IAVs. It hopes to provide information for practitioners in the medical field during the epidemic season.

Keywords: Coronaviruses; Diagnosis; Influenza A viruses; Prevention; Therapy; Transmission.

Fig. 1

Spike proteins and life cycles of CoV and IAV. 3D models of CoV with spike protein genes based polygenetic tree (A) and summary diagram of the CoV life cycle (B). (C) IAV with HA protein genes based polygenetic tree and (D) summary diagram of IAV life cycle. Both neighbor-joining trees are generated by using ClustalX 1.83 and MEGA7 with the full length of glycoprotein genes downloaded from GenBank. The year in the brackets indicates that the time of the virus was reported first.