I mean "corona virus" is a extreme corse category of viri which contains all viri of which the outer shell has a certain kind of structure which looks like a corona (crown).
While this puts some constraints on how the virtual can survive outside if the body and similar thinks it still does say hardly anything about e.g. what cells the virus hijacts, what syntoms it causes, etc.
The plural is virus is viruses, or "virus" if you insist on its Latin form. It's a Latin word, but it only occurs in Latin as a singular collective noun:
Coronavirus is the name given to a family of related RNA viruses. The family is named for the spikes. The family is not defined by the spikes. The family is defined by genetics and evolutionary relationships. So yes, we can infer plenty. The covid virus is actually so closely related to another one of the coronavirus (the sars virus) that it's considered just another strain of the sars virus (hence the name Sars-cov-2)
Idk but my impression is SARS-CoV-2 was named that way because it causes a SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, though it’s not the SARS. “SARS” include SARS-CoV SARS and other “SARSs” like COVID-19.
Probably the SARS was too generic of a name... in complete hindsight, SARS should have been named as “SARS COVID-02” and MERS as “SARS COVID-12” or something like that.
I can see where that impression came from since it is a generic sounding name, but SARS is not a generic symptom name like "fever" or "cough." There is only the SARS disease, caused by the SARS-cov virus, and the related COVID disease, caused by another strain of the SARS-cov virus. the strain of virus causing covid is of the same species as the virus that caused SARS. In general, biology names are just really annoying and nonsensical, so I totally see where it's easy to be led astray by these annoying, generic sounding names, the reuse of the word SARS for a specific disease and a species of coronavirus strains, all of which are the same single species and are related and are called SARS-cov viruses, but where only one of them causes the disease called SARS, while another one causes the disease called COVID-19. And to add to the confusion, people just refer to COVID-19 as COVID, but all COVID stands for is "Coronavirus Disease." So the coronaviruses are a family of genetically/evolutionarily related viruses, but only one of them, a strain of the sars virus species, causes coronavirus disease. And while lots of diseases cause respiratory issues in the middle east, only one specific coronavirus gets to cause Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
"Taxonomically, SARS-CoV-2 is a strain of severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus"
The official paper announcing the name of SARS-COV-2, Titled: The species Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus: classifying 2019-nCoV and naming it SARS-CoV-2
The classification of virus is difficult, but it is not based only in the shape. The shape may give some hints, and help to get a friendly name, but it is not the only property. Moreover, in the last (10?) years it is easier and easier to sequence the genome of them, and understand the relations.
For an more familiar example, think about the distinction of rabbits and hares. I can't for the life of me distinguish them, but they are not very related and biologist can classify them and get the more related species of them (specially if the rabbit/hare is dead and they can open it and look at the inner parts and bones, or even better, make a genetic analysis).
Another example is sharks vs dolphins. Both live in water and they look somewhat similar. (I think I can distinguish them.) Why are sharks a type of fish, but dolphins are not?
I mean "corona virus" is a extreme corse category of viri which contains all viri of which the outer shell has a certain kind of structure which looks like a corona (crown).
While this puts some constraints on how the virtual can survive outside if the body and similar thinks it still does say hardly anything about e.g. what cells the virus hijacts, what syntoms it causes, etc.
Edit: maybe from other SARS corona viri