The pandemic has reached a grim milestone: one million people have now died of COVID-19, according to Worldometers.

On 13 January, the Conversation published ‘Mystery China pneumonia outbreak likely caused by new human coronavirus’ by Dr Connor Bamford (PhD), a virologist at Queen’s University Belfast.

Since then, it has published more than 3500 articles on the now not-so-novel coronavirus, officially named SARS-CoV-2.

Despite this huge output from the world’s leading experts, we have merely skimmed the surface of all there is to know about this perplexing pathogen. So much remains a mystery.