Coronavirus Update: Here is the latest way this deadly virus could be spreading

Since the coronavirus occurred in Wuhan, China back in December 2019, scientists have been scrambling around trying to understand this new infection.
At first, researchers figured out that the virus is transmitted through droplets from an infected person's cough.
Now, scientists have found a secondary path of transmission that has nothing to do with the respiratory system.

A new study may have found a new path of transmission for the deadly coronavirus that is spreading rapidly all over the world.

After studying a total of 14 out of 138 patients (10 percent) with abdominal symptoms and loose stool in a Wuhan hospital, scientists discovered that this infection could be transmitted through faeces.

According to the Chinese authors in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), this is attributed to the fact that infected patients initially present with diarrhoea and nausea one or two days before developing fever and laboured breathing.

Patients suffering with diarrhoea are treated at a health centre in Beira as cyclone-hit Mozambique faces a mounting cholera outbreak AFP

"Importantly, 2019-nCoV has been reported elsewhere in the faeces of patients with atypical abdominal symptoms, similar to SARS which was also shed in urine, suggesting a faecal transmission route which is highly transmissible," William Keevil, a professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton said in a comment to the UK's Science Media Centre.

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For Jiayu Liao, a bioengineer at the University of California, Riverside, "The 2019-nCoV virus found in stool may be transmitted through faecal spread."

He added, "We still do not know how long this virus can survive outside the body - HIV can only survive roughly 30 minutes outside the body - and what temperature range the 2019-nCoV is sensitive to."

Reacting to the new study, Benjamin Neuman, a virology expert at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, noted that faecal transmission is "certainly worth considering."