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It’s good to have a heads-up about this virus, but I don’t think it is pandemic capable.

There are certain limitations in this study. The mouse strain used has some differences from typical laboratory mice that might be significant in the pathogenicity of this virus.

The authors did not describe any route of transmission of this virus. They used an intranasal infusion to infect the mice and did find high loads of viral RNA on the third day after infection, which suggests it can spread through the respiratory route.

The virus they used has been altered through multiple passages in cell culture. This can be analogous to virus mutating when it spreads from person to person. So, we could see comparable mutations in a real life setting—or we might not.

The reason I think it is not pandemic capable is that, in general, the more deadly a pathogen is, the quicker the infected organism develops symptoms. The symptoms are also more severe. So, if someone in China prepares and cooks an infected pangolin and gets the infection as a result, they might become too sick too quickly to pass the virus on to others.

A perfect pandemic capable virus is one that has a high, but not astronomically high, death rate. Infected people, at least initially, feel well enough to go out of their houses and interact with others. It is probably spread through the respiratory route. It is capable of sustained human to human transmission. The SARS-CoV-2 virus demonstrated these properties from the beginning. So far, this GX_P2V(short_3UTR) virus has not been shown to have these properties. Maybe it is capable of sustained human to human transmission and is spread through the respiratory route, maybe not.

I could be completely wrong in this assessment and it turns out to be another pandemic virus with an even higher death rate than Covid. But, for now, I am not going to worry.