The DOI matches its Crossref record; 53 of the 53 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
COVID-19, SARS and MERS: are they closely related?
Open accessAbstract
Background The 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is a new human coronavirus which is spreading with epidemic features in China and other Asian countries; cases have also been reported worldwide. This novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is associated with a respiratory illness that may lead to severe pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Although related to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), COVID-19 shows some peculiar pathogenetic, epidemiological and clinical features which to date are not completely understood. Aims To provide a review of the differences in pathogenesis, epidemiology and clinical features of COVID-19, SARS and MERS. Sources The most recent literature in the English language regarding COVID-19 has been reviewed, and extracted data have been compared with the current scientific evidence about SARS and MERS epidemics. Content COVID-19 seems not to be very different from SARS regarding its clinical features. However, it has a fatality rate of 2.3%, lower than that of SARS (9.5%) and much lower than that of MERS (34.4%). The possibility cannot be excluded that because of the less severe clinical picture of COVID-19 it can spread in the community more easily than MERS and SARS. The actual basic reproductive number (R 0 ) of COVID-19 (2.0–2.5) is still controversial. It is probably slightly higher than the R 0 of SARS (1.7–1.9) and higher than that of MERS (<1). A gastrointestinal route of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, which has been assumed for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation. Implications There is still much more to know about COVID-19, especially as concerns mortality and its capacity to spread on a pandemic level. Nonetheless, all of the lessons we learned in the past from the SARS and MERS epidemics are the best cultural weapons with which to face this new global threat.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China
Huang, C., Wang, Y., Li, X., Ren, L., Zhao, J., Hu, Y., Zhang, L., Fan, G., Xu, J., Gu, X., et al. (2020) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30183-5 · Cited by 48,884
A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019
Zhu, N., Zhang, D., Wang, W., Li, X., Yang, B., Song, J., Zhao, X., Huang, B., Shi, W., Lu, R., et al. (2020) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa2001017 · Cited by 28,244
Chen, N., Zhou, M., Dong, X., Qu, J., Gong, F., Han, Y., Qiu, Y., Wang, J., Liu, Y., Wei, Y., et al. (2020) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30211-7 · Cited by 21,415
Wang, D., Hu, B., Hu, C., Zhu, F., Liu, X., Zhang, J., Wang, B., Xiang, H., Cheng, Z., Xiong, Y., et al. (2020) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.2020.1585 · Cited by 20,148
La certeza de lo impredecible: Cultura Educación y Sociedad en tiempos de COVID19
Martínez González, M. (2020) · DSPACE System - Metalibrary (University of the Coast) · Cited by 18,463
Early transmission dynamics in Wuhan, China, of novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia
Li, Q., Guan, X., Wu, P., Wang, X., Zhou, L., Tong, Y., Ren, R., Leung, K. S. M., Lau, E. H. Y., Wong, J. Y., et al. (2020) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa2001316 · Cited by 16,575
Lu, R., Zhao, X., Li, J., Niu, P., Yang, B., Wu, H., Wang, W., Song, H., Huang, B., Zhu, N., et al. (2020) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30251-8 · Cited by 11,907
Chan, J. F.-W., Yuan, S., Kok, K.-H., To, K. K.-W., Chu, H., Yang, J., Xing, F., Liu, J., Yip, C. C.-Y., Poon, R. W.-S., et al. (2020) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30154-9 · Cited by 8,944
First case of 2019 novel coronavirus in the United States
Holshue, M. L., DeBolt, C., Lindquist, S., Lofy, K. H., Wiesman, J., Bruce, H., Spitters, C., Ericson, K., Wilkerson, S., Tural, A., et al. (2020) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa2001191 · Cited by 6,030
Hamming, I., Timens, W., Bulthuis, M., Lely, A., Navis, G., & van Goor, H. (2004) · The Journal of Pathology · doi:10.1002/path.1570 · Cited by 5,676
Cited by
Rogers, J. P., Chesney, E., Oliver, D., Pollak, T. A., McGuire, P., Fusar-Poli, P., Zandi, M. S., Lewis, G., & David, A. S. (2020) · The Lancet Psychiatry · doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(20)30203-0 · Cited by 2,407
The cytokine storm and COVID-19
Hu, B., Huang, S., & Yin, L. (2021) · Journal of Medical Virology · doi:10.1002/jmv.26232 · Cited by 1,655
The SARS-CoV-2 main protease as drug target
Ullrich, S., & Nitsche, C. (2020) · Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters · doi:10.1016/j.bmcl.2020.127377 · Cited by 772
The prevalence of depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances in COVID-19 patients: a meta-analysis
Deng, J., Zhou, F., Hou, W., Silver, Z., Wong, C. Y., Chang, O., Huang, E., & Zuo, Q. K. (2021) · Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1111/nyas.14506 · Cited by 771
Household Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Madewell, Z. J., Yang, Y., Longini, I. M., Halloran, M. E., & Dean, N. E. (2020) · JAMA Network Open · doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.31756 · Cited by 716
Metadata
- Authors
- Petrosillo, N., Viceconte, G., Ergonul, O., Ippolito, G., & Petersen, E.
- Venue
- Clinical Microbiology and Infection
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-06
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 729-734
- ISSN
- 1198-743X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3013008917
- Cited by
- 1,108
- References
- 53
- FWCI
- 30.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: COVID-19, SARS and MERS: are they closely related? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.cmi.2020.03.026
- The paper
- Petrosillo, N., Viceconte, G., Ergonul, O., Ippolito, G., & Petersen, E. (2020). COVID-19, SARS and MERS: are they closely related? Clinical Microbiology and Infection. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmi.2020.03.026
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
