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Coronavirus Facts and Information thread:

Stevicus

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
A New Coronavirus May Be Making People Sick. And It's Coming From Dogs : Goats and Soda : NPR

In the past 20 years, new coronaviruses have emerged from animals with remarkable regularity. In 2002, SARS-CoV jumped from civets into people. Ten years later, MERS emerged from camels. Then in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 began to spread around the world.

For many scientists, this pattern points to a disturbing trend: Coronavirus outbreaks aren't rare events — but will likely occur every decade or so.

Now, scientists are reporting that they have discovered what may be the latest coronavirus to jump from animals into people. And it comes from a surprising source: dogs.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first exploded, Dr. Gregory Gray started to wonder if there might be other coronaviruses out there, already making people sick and threatening to trigger another outbreak.
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The problem was, he didn't have a tool to look for them. The test for COVID-19, he says, is extremely limited. It tells whether one particular virus – SARS-CoV-2 – is present in a person's respiratory tract, and nothing else.

"Diagnostics are very specific. They generally focus on known viruses," says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University's Global Health Institute.

So he challenged a graduate student in his lab, Leshan Xiu, to make a more powerful test — one that would work like a COVID-19 test but could detect all coronaviruses, even the unknown ones.
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Xiu not only rose to the challenge, but the tool he created worked better than expected.

In the first batch of samples tested last year, Gray and Xiu found evidence of an entirely new coronavirus associated with pneumonia in hospitalized patients — mostly in kids. This virus may be the eighth coronavirus known to cause disease in people, the team reports Thursday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
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The samples came from patients at a hospital in Sarawak, Malaysia, taken by a collaborator in 2017 and 2018. "These were deep nasal swabs, like doctors collect with the COVID-19 patients," says Gray.

The patients had what looked like regular pneumonia. But in eight out of 301 samples tested, or 2.7%, Xui and Gray found that the patients' upper respiratory tracts were infected with a new canine coronavirus — a dog virus.

"That's a pretty high prevalence of a [new] virus," Gray says. "That's remarkable." So remarkable, in fact, that Gray actually thought maybe he and Xiu had made a mistake. Perhaps Xiu's test wasn't working quite right. "You always wonder if there was a problem in the lab," he says.

To find out, he sent the patients' samples over to a world expert on animal coronaviruses at Ohio State University. She was also dubious. "I thought, there's something wrong," says virologist Anastasia Vlasova. "Canine coronaviruses were not thought to be transmitted to people. It's never been reported before."

Nevertheless, Vlasova went to work. She tried to grow the coronavirus in the lab, using a special solution she knew worked for other dog coronaviruses. Lo and behold, "the virus grew very well," she says.
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Stevicus

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Japan extends COVID-19 state of emergency to June 20 - UPI.com

May 28 (UPI) -- The Japanese central government on Friday extended its coronavirus state of emergency for nine prefectures to June 20 just a little more than a month before the scheduled Summer Olympic Games opening ceremony in Tokyo.

Government leaders in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Aichi, Fukuoka, Hokkaido, Okayama and Hiroshima prefectures had called for the state of emergency to be extended past May 31, the original deadline.
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Some are calling for the Tokyo Olympics to be cancelled.

The state of emergency was expanded as the movement grows for the Tokyo Olympics to be canceled. The newspaper Asahi Shimbun, one of the local sponsors, wrote an editorial Wednesday calling on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to "to calmly and objectively assess the situation and decide on the cancellation of the event this summer."

"The foremost priority must lie on maintaining a basic structure that protects the lives, health and livelihoods of citizens," the editorial said. "The Olympics must never be allowed to invite a situation that threatens this structure."
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Stevicus

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
And on the subject of the Olympics, the head of Japan's doctors union says a new variant could come about during the Olympics.

Doctor warns new COVID-19 variant could emerge during Tokyo Olympics - UPI.com

May 27 (UPI) -- The Tokyo Olympics could generate a new strain of the novel coronavirus and endanger the lives of athletes and the local population, according to a Japanese physician Thursday.

Naoto Ueyama, the head of Japan Doctors' Union, said at a Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan press conference the Summer Games could be the site of new infections, contradicting earlier claims made by members of the International Olympic Committee.
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Ueyama said vaccines and virus testing would not prevent variants from spreading during the Olympics.

With "so many mutant varieties coming into one place one city," there is an "opportunity for different strains to merge or fuse" to create a dangerous new variant, Ueyama said.
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Revoltingest

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
- Alert -
If anyone watches OAN, beware its anti-vax agenda.
It's useful to see how their minds work, but not a good source of info.
 
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