“This gets into every major biological process in our cells,” said Nevan J. Krogan, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied HIV, Ebola, Zika, dengue and other viruses over the last 13 years.

“At the molecular level, it’s something we’ve never seen before, and then look at what it does to the body — the long list of symptoms — we’ve never seen that before.”…

“The thing that strikes me about the clinical aspect is the shear amount of transmissibility,” said Megan Freeman, a virologist and specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

“There are very few viruses that are more contagious than this one,” agreed Mark Schleiss, an investigator for the Institute of Molecular Virology at the University of Minnesota.