Mirroring History of the “Russian Flu”: Infectomic Decoding of Covid-19

The “Russian Flu” was the biggest human CoV disease pandemic in the history before the ongoing global pandemic of COVID-19 occurred. The causative CoV agent, OC43, of “Russian Flu” was finally revealed in 2005 by infectomics-based molecular clock analysis. To date, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged public health systems globally, raising various dilemmas or controversial issues that include the origin of virus, cross-species transmission to humans, intervention measures, and various impacts related to the ecologic and evolutionary aspects of viral infections. The future of SARS-CoV-2 transmission will mainly depend on the duration of immunity, and the degree of cross-immunity between SARS-CoV-2 and other HCoVs. While most research on host-pathogen interactions has only explored medical aspects of herd immunity, much less attention has been paid to evolutionary and ecological aspects of immunity (ecoimmunity) against infectious diseases, including COVID-19. This ebook will focus on mirroring the past and decoding of COVID-19 using the infectomic approaches.
Chapter one is to introduce the coronavirus disease issue to be explored. Chapter two is about infectomic identification of the causative agent of the “Russian Flu” outbreak in 1889. It may yield new insight into the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Chapter three states the issue of ecoimmunity that is a missing link to the major scientific dilemma of COVID-19. Chapter four discusses the roles of exosymbiosis-endosymbiosis balance (EESB) and ecohealth in COVID-19. Chapter five is a summary of this ebook. SARS-CoV-2 may eventually become a new HCoV (No. 5) that is persistently circulating in humans and causes common cold in a way similar to OC43.