The SARS-CoV-2 good news
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This morning brings really encouraging news from South Korea, suggesting that those “reinfections” or “re-activations” that doctors in that country had previously reported “came because fragments of the virus remained in their bodies and showed up in test kits.” Apparently the tests the South Koreans were using were “so sensitive that [they] can still pick up parts of the small amount of RNA from a cell even after the person has recovered from COVID-19.
Oxford University and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals are cautiously optimistic about the early stages of their vaccine development.
Gilead Sciences said today that “patients taking its drug remdesivir had a speedier recovery than patients taking placebo in a large government-funded study, but didn’t release detailed data showing the magnitude of the benefit.”
And one of the nightmare scenarios, involving the virus mutating and evolving faster into new strains than treatments can be developed, thankfully appears unlikely.
How many strains are there? One analysis from last month identified eight different strains. Researchers at Zhejiang University in China released a paper saying they had identified more than 30 mutations and concluding “Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity” — meaning some strains were more likely to kill the infected than others. Nextstrain.org is attempting to track and visualize the spread of different strains around the globe.
The next big question is how different those strains are. A study published earlier this month theorized that the reason some locations on the east coast, like New York City and northern New Jersey, have been hit so hard is because the strain there is more virulent than the one that hit the West Coast. “The G strain is predominantly on the East Coast of the United States, and the D strain is predominantly on the West Coast. . . . This observation may partially explain the discrepancy in predicted deaths from COVID-19 between the East Coast and West Coast, and possibly explain that other factors aside from social distance, such as competition between two strains of differing virulence, may be at play.”
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More threads like this, please.
