Question: What is the newest virus that has been discovered

Jordan Kirby answered on 6 Mar 2019:

Hey Chase,
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Im not sure about computer viruses but biological viruses i can possibly shed some light on it…
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and sadly its a tricky question to answer indeed! Mainly because new viruses are being found every minute (thats not even an exaggeration). Since viruses can produce so many new generations in such a short time (by generations i mean like new viruses bit like how you are a generation of children) it means new mutations are always popping up, and new strains are always turning up.
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To put it into context on how many viruses there are in the world lets just look at the ocean. The latest predictions of the Volumes of the worlds oceans are 1.332 Billion cubic Km, if we take the fact that there are ~50,000,000 viruses in each millilitre of sea water then work it out for the ocean we get the absolutely absurd value of ~6.66×10^31 viruses… or if you like lots of zeroes its:
~66,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 6.66 Nonillion!
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And thats just in the ocean!
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To put that further into perspective lets compaire that number to other really numerous things:
– Cells in a human body = 3.72 Trillion (37,200,000,000,000)
– Stars in the milky way galaxy = 250 billion (250,000,000,000)
– Starts in the observable universe = 80 Sextillion (80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)
(DISCLAMER – i am not a physicist so size of universe might vary 😛 )
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So yeah there are alot of viruses on our planet! So finding new varients and mutants are incredibly common!