This COVID-19 event has been created by a combination of computational inference (see https://reactome.org/documentation/inferred-events) from SARS-CoV-1 data and manual curation, as described in the summation for the overall SARS-CoV-2 infection pathway.

The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid is released from the host cell endosome into the cytosol. Molecular details of this step are not well worked out. Studies of the infection of the human cultured cells with HCoV-229E coronavirus established a requirement for VCP (transitional endoplasmic reticulum ATPase) protein function for release to occur (Wong et al. 2015). A similar requirement for VCP involvement in SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid release is inferred here.