NEW YORK – Researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and their collaborators have sequenced the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pathogen from patient samples and have found it to be genetically distinct from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus that caused an epidemic in 2002 and 2003, as well as from the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus that was detected in 2012.