‘According to a “potentially revolutionary” theory put forward by Professor Ituro Inoue, a genetics expert, the Delta variant simply accumulated too many mutations to the virus’s error-correcting protein called nsp14. Prof Inoue says the virus struggled to repair the errors in time and ultimately caused its own “self-destruction”.
Read here (News.com.au, Nov 22, 2021)
The pandemic keeps changing, but these principles can guide your thinking through the seasons to come.
Read here (The Atlantic, Sept 20, 2021)
‘A very important public service message started circulating in WhatsApp groups in Pakistan and India. It highlights that new Indian COVID variant can be as disastrous for Pakistan as it has been for India. It is written by Dr Pradeep Senha from Sassoon General Hospital Maharashtra. He says “COVID19 new mutation is giving false negatives in nasal swaps.”...
‘He writes, “The virus is now hitting straight into the lungs. It is carrying no symptoms like fever or cough. Just body ache, weakness, loss of appetite. Patients go from mild condition to extreme life and death situation within 8 to 10 hours.”
‘Dr Senha reports an alarming situation in India, he writes, “Our colleagues in small towns across India especially North Eastern regions are saying it is a battle we have already lost. It is now damage control and save as many lives as possible. We have seen 400 plus children just in our district die within 10 to 12 hours. Initial period they showed no symptoms and within hours their oxygen levels dropped and deceased.”
‘He says “We have also attended to several patients who traveled into Mumbai from overseas and had received their jabs and ended up contracting the Indian COVID and 17 out of 28 have died. Health services both in public and private hospitals have collapsed. Rich, middle class and poor all are affected and it is spreading fast, very fast. Any further mutation or variants will potentially be a doomsday scenario.”
Read here (Global Village Space, Apr 24, 2021)
‘Despite dire warnings, a stockpile of ready compounds to fight viral pandemics was sorely lacking. Can drugmakers finally do the right thing?...
“What we will hopefully find”, he [Alejandro Chavez, a bioengineer and antiviral drug researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City] says, “are inhibitors that work on, if you’re really lucky, an entire family.” That would make the best-case scenario a pan-coronavirus inhibitor. But a more reasonable goal might be developing a drug for a subset of coronaviruses, such as alphacoronaviruses, which currently cause non-lethal infections in humans, and having a different drug for betacoronaviruses, the group responsible for SARS, MERS, and COVID-19.
‘Once the viral lineage is identified, “the same principles of drug discovery apply”, says Marnix Van Loock, head of emerging pathogens at Johnson & Johnson’s global public-health unit in Beerse, Belgium. As he explains, researchers need to find ‘druggable pockets’ on the surface of essential enzymes that are conserved between related viruses and can be used to design active molecules.’
Read here (Nature, Apr 14, 2021)
‘You may already know that viruses mutate, that this is normal and these small changes to the virus’s genetic code are to be expected. Well, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean they’re always harmless. Many mutations will be irrelevant, and some will make a virus weaker and will die out. But others will make it fitter, giving it an advantage over other variants and allowing it to out-compete them.
‘As people socially distance, observe stricter personal hygiene and wear masks, it becomes an advantage for the virus to be more transmissible. Similarly, as more people around the world gain immunity through being infected or vaccinated, another advantage would be for the virus to change so that antibodies can no longer attach to it and prevent it from infecting cells.
‘It’s therefore not surprising to see variants with mutations that provide these advantages now out-competing other forms of the coronavirus. Control measures and rising immunity are pressuring the coronavirus to evolve.’
Read here (The Conversation, Mar 3, 2021)
‘Fighting the pandemic isn’t only about vaccines and drugs. It’s about understanding how viruses mutate and change inside us, and among us...
‘The major change to the immunity of all the hosts SARS-CoV-2 is likely to try to infect will be, of course, vaccination. That’s human ingenuity fighting viral expertise, but it can also exert a kind of direct adaptive pressure on the virus. History has examples of so-called leaky vaccines—those that aren’t effective enough to prevent all infections or all transmission, and allow better-adapted variants of whatever bug they’re trying to squish to live to fight another day.
‘In fact, one group of researchers has a model that suggests that could even happen with the new batch of vaccines against Covid—especially those that require two doses and seem to confer different levels of immunity depending on how far apart they’re administered, or whether someone skips the second one. Here's how: If one extreme is a population totally naive to a new virus, completely vulnerable and with no immunity, and the other extreme is a population with perfect sterilizing immunity, what happens to a population in between? If a vaccine allows infection but no transmission, the virus doesn’t have a chance to evolve.
‘But if a vaccine or vaccination strategy allows some infection and some transmission? “The ones that are the best at getting around the host’s defenses are the ones that are most likely to persist,” says Caroline Wagner, a bioengineer at McGill and one of the people working on the model. If that’s all true, a leaky vaccine or leaky vaccination strategy could actually drive antigenic drift and create even worse variants. Wagner and her colleagues acknowledge that they don’t have enough data to put bounds on their model yet, but they worry about strategies like one proposed in the UK to abandon second doses as a way of speeding the process and husbanding scarce vaccine, or the way some countries are hoarding vaccine while others go without (potentially letting the virus, and variants, circulate and evolve freely).’
Read here (Wired, Mar 1, 2021)
A look at some of the most commonly asked questions around the coronavirus pandemic.
And more...
Read here (AP, Feb 25, 2021)
‘As new, more infectious variants of COVID-19 continue to pop up in the U.S. and other parts of the world, Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, which is the maker of one of two coronavirus vaccines approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration, believes the virus could be around “forever.”
‘Speaking during a panel discussion at the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, Bancel said he agrees with emerging data suggesting that “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away. We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” he said, according to a CNBC report.’
Read here (Christian Post, Jan 15, 2021)
‘Like plague, Covid-19 is a stealth infection, and that might ultimately slow evolution toward lower virulence. Yersinia pestis, the germ that causes plague, tamps down the early immune response, so that infected people can travel and spread infection for days before they feel sick. Similarly, people infected with SARS-CoV-2 seem capable of infecting others before experiencing any symptoms. This sly mode of viral spread may make the evolution of lower virulence less likely, as infected but asymptomatic people are the perfect mobile viral delivery systems.
‘Yet even without an evolutionary process pushing SARS-CoV-2 towards lower virulence, over time, the virus might affect people differently, said Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello. “SARS-CoV-2 may become less deadly, not because the virus changes, but because very few people will have no immunity,” he said. In other words, if you’re exposed to the virus as a child (when it doesn’t seem to make people particularly sick) and then again and again in adulthood, you’ll only get a mild infection. Racaniello points out that the four circulating common cold coronaviruses “all came into humans from animal hosts, and they may have been initially quite virulent.” Now, he says, they infect 90 percent of children at young ages. At later ages, all you get is the common cold.’
Read here (Genetic Literacy Project, Jan 7, 2021)
‘The U.K. lineage of SARS-CoV-2 has apparently acquired 17 mutations that lead to amino acid changes in its proteins all at once, a feat never seen before in the coronavirus. Crucially, eight of them were in the gene that encodes spike, a protein on the viral surface that the pathogen uses to enter human cells. “There's now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh... Read the story for more details.’
Read here (Science magazine, Jan 1, 2021)
‘The government is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to scientists researching the virus’ origins in southern China and affiliated with the military, the AP has found. But it is monitoring their findings and mandating that the publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, according to internal documents obtained by the AP. A rare leak from within the government, the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: The clampdown comes from the top.’
Read here (AP, Dec 31, 2020)
‘As bacteria grow more resistant to antibiotics, bacteriophage therapy is making a comeback...
‘Phages, or bacteriophages, are viruses that infect only bacteria. Each kingdom of life—plants, animals, bacteria, and so on—has its own distinct complement of viruses. Animal and plant viruses have always received most of our scientific attention, because they pose a direct threat to our health, and that of our livestock and crops. The well-being of bacteria has, understandably, been of less concern, yet the battle between viruses and bacteria is brutal: scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours. As we are now all too aware, animal-specific viruses can mutate enough to infect a different animal species. But they will not attack bacteria, and bacteriophage viruses are similarly harmless to animals, humans included. Phage therapy operates on the principle that the enemy of our enemy could be our friend.’
Read here (The New Yorker, Dec 14, 2020)
‘Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story...
‘Researchers since then have uncovered evidence that pathogens exert ‘the strongest selective pressure to drive the evolution of modern humans’. Among the drivers, look to evidence that prehistoric pandemics played a role in selecting for ancestral traits and behaviours that we recognise as human today. Scientists following another thread in this evolutionary narrative describe viral nucleic acids insinuating themselves into our genetic codes. The biologist David Enard at Stanford University in California and colleagues have concluded that ‘viruses are one of the most dominant drivers of evolutionary change across mammalian and human proteomes’...
‘As we become more deft at exploring the nested, dynamically complex relationships among viruses, bacteria, fungi and ourselves, we’ll come closer to grasping how pandemics emerge from a rupturing and rearranging of these relationships. From this deep linking of Aion with Chronos, we can already see the outlines of the wisdom that pandemics offer us. What we’re beginning to faintly understand is this: if we wish to survive as a species, we must gather all of our knowledge from multiple perspectives – however fragmented and partial – and actively engage in conversations with the world we inhabit and that gives us life. Only then will we begin to understand ourselves, and live up to our name, the wise ones, Homo sapiens sapiens.’
Read here (Aeon, Nov 3, 2020)
‘The Covid-19 virus remains active on human skin for nine hours, Japanese researchers have found, in a discovery they said showed the need for frequent hand washing to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. The pathogen that causes the flu survives on human skin for about 1.8 hours by comparison, said the study published this month in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal.’
Read here (Straits Times, Oct 18, 2020)
‘The new coronavirus may remain infectious for weeks on banknotes, glass and other common surfaces, according to research by Australia’s top biosecurity laboratory that highlights risks from paper currency, touchscreen devices and grab handles and rails.
‘Scientists at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness showed SARS-CoV-2 is “extremely robust,” surviving for 28 days on smooth surfaces such as glass found on mobile phone screens and plastic banknotes at room temperature, or 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). That compares with 17 days survival for the flu virus.’
Read here (Bloomberg, Oct 11, 2020)
‘Hungarian team finds virus particle withstands being probed by a nano needle 100 times, possibly making it the most physically elastic virus known. French scientists find it can replicate in animal cells after being exposed to temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius for an hour.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Sept 18, 2020)