The biology of coronavirus COVID-19 - including research and treatments

That sounds cogent. The pangolin virus might have got played with or there might be coincidence but the simplest explanation looks plausible. Might be good news for pangolins.

 

Perhaps it is a novel bat virus, evolved through zoonotic transmission to pangolins (recombination with some pangolin virus components) and back?

 

I think they could do with some good news right now.

 

The FDA issued approval for "Investigational COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma - Emergency INDs" on March 24th.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-...l-covid-19-convalescent-plasma-emergency-inds

 

Sajadi et al. Temperature, Humidity and Latitude Analysis to Predict Potential Spread and Seasonality for COVID-19.

Thought this was interesting. The authors write: "The distribution of significant community outbreaks along restricted latitude, temperature, and humidity are consistent with the behavior of a seasonal respiratory virus."



Another study by Wang et al. suggested that high temperature and high humidity reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

Might be a bit of wishful thinking but I'm still hoping that the virus will be less virulent in the summer months.

 

Not sure if this list is on this thread, however, it might be useful to have a collected list of researchers, and what aspect of COVID-19 they are studying.

Here is a partial list of Canadian researchers funded by the federal government, through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR):
https://www.canada.ca/en/institutes...-projects-details-of-the-funded-projects.html

 

Indeed.

I worry about the most densely populated developing countries like India and Bangladesh!

 

Preprint (not peer reviewed), open access
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.20031096v2


Relationship between the ABO Blood Group and the COVID-19 Susceptibility
Jiao Zhao (and many more), 27 March 2020

Chinese study on Chinese patients - blood group distribution differs by ethnicity; wikipedia lists 4 different ethnicities within China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_distribution_by_country) but my geography is too poor to know if this is relevant for the cohorts in this study.

Just my luck: I'm an A.

 

It's amazing, considering how many blood tests I've had over the years, that I have no idea what my blood type is. Looking over the blood test reports, not one of them indicates blood type.

I imagine it's a special test, which may not have much utility unless you need a transfusion. I'm sure that you get blood typed if you go into the military, and it goes on your dog tags, for obvious reasons.

 

Comment on this by O' Reily et al. Effective transmission across the globe: the role of climate in COVID-19 mitigation strategies. https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/current-patterns-transmission/role-of-climate.html

The authors write:

In my view, the fact that it spreads to warmer and more humid places as well isn't really in contradiction to the idea that the virus is most potent and dangerous in a certain climatic zone. If I'm not mistaken, the flu happens around the equator as well but simply less so than it in the north where it does show seasonality.

It should be possible to estimate this: start with the outbreak in Wuhan, look at travel and transport data from Wuhan to elsewhere in the world and then look at the number of COVID-19 cases/per travel from Wuhan in different cities/regions. Then one should be able to estimate if regions in a certain climatic zone have statistically significant more cases than others.

 

My take on the distribution of hotspots along the green line of temperate climate is that this line indicates the zone of the globe that is most conducive to the proliferation of the human species as long as it lives close together indoors in spaces with recycled air. The species does quite well in subSaharan Africa and Neotropics but more often living in open air much of the time. Nothing to do with viruses.

 

Detect Covid-19 in as little as 5 minutes:
https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom...etect-covid-19-in-as-little-as-5-minutes.html

.

 

It's a rapid nucleotide test (it's a repurposing of their rapid Flu test for the specific nucleotide sequences of SARS-Cov-2), so it should be of reasonable accuracy. But I'm still sceptical of all tests that do not publish studies on sensitivity and specificity.

 

This could come in useful given one major reason for not testing more people is a shortage of reagents to perform the tests. In a different (Danish news) piece it was reported that they tested the new method against the existing one and got the same result in 97 out of 100 tests. Not perfect but better than no tests because of the reagent shortages.

https://en.ssi.dk/news/news/2020/03-ssi--solves-essential-covid19-testing-deficiency-problem

 

I don't think it's a routine test. I was tested prior to an operation where they thought I might need a transfusion (I didn't in the end).

 

A number of posts about vaccine development and also about lung function have been moved here from the Worldwide spread and control thread.

Says here that "no RNA vaccine has ever been licensed" [https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/rna-vaccines-are-coronavirus-frontrunners/4011326.article].

I think Ian Lipkin mentions the development of an "RNA vaccine" in his talk @Jonathan Edwards @Snow Leopard any views on how feasible this is?

 

I don't know the practical details of this as it is not my area. What I get from my nephew Al Edwards, who IS in this area, is that nobody has a proven method to take off the shelf. I would personally be surprised if a vaccine containing RNA was good - RNA is unstable. What I have heard is the suggestion of using a benign viral vector to infect human cells that carries the DNA that matches the SARS-2 RNA for something like spike protein. This would be a DNA vaccine but would work by switching on the same protein manufacture as the virus does.

A lot of the problem seems to be getting a method that infects 'spare' cells like muscle cells and gets them to produce the right amount of antigen - not too much , not too little. Muscle cells have been infected with DNA using viral vectors but nobody seems to know how easy it will be to do that with virus proteins.