New Updates on Coronavirus

US scientists announced on Wednesday that they had created the first 3D atomic scale map of the part of the novel coronavirus that attaches to and infects human cells, a critical step toward developing a vaccine and treatments.

It came as the death toll from the Covid-19 illness jumped past 2,000, almost all of them in mainland China, where 74,185 cases of infection have been confirmed since it first emerged in late December.

The team from the University of Texas at Austin and the



National Institutes of Health (NIH) first studied the genetic code of the virus made publicly available by Chinese researchers and used it to develop a stabilised sample of a key part called the spike protein.

The latest figures bring the total number of coronavirus cases in China to over 74,000 with 2,004 deaths, three quarters of which have occurred in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan. The city of 11 million people, where the virus first appeared last year, is under virtual lockdown.