Table 2.

Seven known human-specific CoV in relation to the severity of their infection in humans

CoV	Severity of the disease	Reference
HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43 (known for decades)	Mild resp. signs	(McIntosh et al. 1967)
HCoV-NL63 and HCoV-HKU1 (recently discovered)	Mild resp. signs	(Woo et al. 2005)
SARS	Serious respiratory signs with low mortality rate	(Lim et al. 2016, Lau et al. 2005, Peiris et al. 2004)
MERS	Serious respiratory signs with high mortality rate	(Yang et al. 2015)
SARS-CoV2	Serious respiratory signs with high contagiousness and low mortality rate	(CDC 2020)