Table 1. Characteristics of selected emerging/re-emerging viruses including SARS-CoV-2.

Virus	Family	Particle size	Lipid envelope	Genome* (segments)	Reservoir species	References
Lassa virus	Arenaviridae	110–130 nm	yes	±ssRNA(2)	rodent	Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (2020), St. Georgiev (2009)
SFTSV†	Phenuiviridae	80–100 nm	yes	−ssRNA(3)	tick	Zhan et al. (2017)
Hantaan virus	Hantaviridae	80–120 nm	yes	−ssRNA(3)	rodent	Jiang et al. (2016), Brocato & Hooper (2019), Laenen et al. (2019)
MERS-CoV	Coronaviridae	118–136 nm	yes	+ssRNA(1)	bat	Otter et al. (2016), AABB (2013), Gorbalenya et al. (2020)
SARS-CoV	Coronaviridae	80–90 nm	yes	+ssRNA(1)	bat	Otter et al. (2016), AABB (2013), Gorbalenya et al. (2020)
SARS-CoV-2	Coronaviridae	60–140 nm	yes	+ssRNA(1)	bat‡	Munster et al. (2020), Zhou et al. (2020), Zhu et al. (2020)
Ebola virus	Filoviridae	80 × 14000 nm	yes	−ssRNA(1)	bat	St. Georgiev (2009)
Influenza H5N1	Orthomyxoviridae	80–120 nm	yes	−ssRNA(8)	avian	Cassidy et al. (2018)
Nipah virus	Paramyxoviridae	40–1900 nm	yes	−ssRNA(1)	bat	Ang, Lim & Wang (2018)
EV-D68	Picornaviridae	~30 nm	no	+ssRNA(4)	unknown	Cassidy et al. (2018), Sun, Hu & Yu (2019)

Notes:

^*Segments (1) equates to a non-segmented genome.

^†Now referred to as Huaiyangshan banyangvirus.

^‡Suspected primary host based on >90% sequence homology to bat coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).

±, ambisense; −, negative sense; +, positive sense; ss, single-stranded.