The word coronavirus comes from the Latin word corona, which means crown or wreath. This is because the virus has a series of crown-like spikes on its surface, which you can see under a microscope. The name was coined by June Almeida and David Tyrrell, who first observed and studied human coronaviruses in the 1960s.\r
Coronavirus is a general term for a large family of viruses that can cause different diseases in humans and animals. The virus that causes COVID-19 is a specific type of coronavirus that was discovered in 2019. It is officially named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), because it is genetically related to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003. COVID-19 is an abbreviation of coronavirus disease 2019, which is the name of the disease that SARS-CoV-2 causes