Fielding, Burtram C.2023-02-032023-02-032022Fielding, B. C. (2022). Human coronavirus research: 20 years since the SARS-CoV outbreak. Frontiers in Microbiology, 13, 1035267. 10.3389/fmicb.2022.10352671664-302Xhttps://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.1035267http://hdl.handle.net/10566/8340This Editorial introduces 10 articles published in a Special Issue highlighting human coronavirus (hCoV) research on the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002. Only with the SARS outbreak was the pandemic potential of hCoVs acknowledged. HCoV-OC43 (Tyrrell and Bynoe, 1966), HCoV-229E (Hamre and Procknow, 1966), HCoV-NL63 (Van Der Hoek et al., 2004), and HCoV-HKU1 (Woo et al., 2005) are endemic in the human population and are mainly associated with mild, self-limiting “common cold” illnesses annually. The burden of respiratory tract infections, caused by the four “common-cold” hCoVs, is increased in patients with chronic co-morbidities or clinical risk factors including young children, the elderly and immunocompromised (Van Der Hoek, 2007). On the other hand, the three know pathogenic hCoVs, SARS-CoV (Drosten et al., 2003; Peiris et al., 2003), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) (Zaki et al., 2012), and SARS-CoV-2 (Zhou et al., 2020a,b), cause severe respiratory syndromes and result in high morbidities and mortalities, especially in the elderly (Chen et al., 2020).enCovid-19BiosciencePublic healthMiddle EastSevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV)Article