What the Coronavirus Image You’ve Seen a Million Times Really Shows
The illustration visualizes how the virus infects people
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A colorful 3D rendering of a spiky fuzzball has spread around the world at least as fast as the coronavirus. The image, used by news media around the world, was created by Alissa Eckert, a medical illustrator at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with her colleague Dan Higgins.
It is not a photograph, but rather an illustrated visualization of the microscopic coronavirus.
“The image was originally designed with the public in mind,” Eckert tells Elemental. “However, it also serves to help researchers differentiate and visualize their information. Creating visual representations of diseases provides a way to take something complex and abstract and make it tangible through visualization.”
Viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 disease, are not technically living things, and they can’t reproduce on their own. They invade cells in the bodies of animals, including humans, and take over — making people sick. The hijacked host cells then reproduce the virus. We may feel sick for two reasons: The virus can disrupt the normal…
