Virus World

Fang Bin and other members of the public who were dubbed citizen journalists posted details of the pandemic in early 2020 on the internet and social media, embarrassing Chinese officials who faced criticism for failing to control the outbreak.

HONG KONG (AP) — Chinese authorities were preparing Sunday to release a man who disappeared three years ago after publicizing videos of overcrowded hospitals and bodies during the COVID-19 outbreak, a relative and another person familiar with his case said. Fang Bin and other members of the public who were dubbed citizen journalists posted details of the pandemic in early 2020 on the internet and social media, embarrassing Chinese officials who faced criticism for failing to control the outbreak. The last video Fang, a seller of traditional Chinese clothing, posted on Twitter was of a piece of paper reading, “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.” Fang’s case is part of Beijing’s crackdown on criticism of China’s early handling of the pandemic, as the ruling Communist Party seeks to control the narrative of the country. He was scheduled to be released Sunday, according to two people who did not want to be identified for fear of government retribution. One of them said Fang was sentenced to three years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague charge traditionally used against political dissidents.

The Associated Press could not independently confirm his release and could not confirm the details with the authorities. Two offices of Wuhan’s public security bureau did not provide a phone number of their information office or answer any questions. Phone calls to a court that reportedly sentenced Fang rang unanswered on Sunday afternoon. A woman from another court that had reportedly handled Fang’s appeal said she was not authorized to answer questions. In early 2020, the initial COVID outbreak devastated the city of Wuhan, home to 11 million residents, in central China’s Hubei province. Under a 76-day lockdown, its streets were deserted for months, apart from ambulances and security personnel. At that time, a small number of citizen journalists tried to tell their stories and those of others with smart phones and social media accounts, defying the Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information. Although their movement was small, the scale was unprecedented in any previous major disease outbreak or disaster in China. But the information they posed soon got them into trouble. Fang and another citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi, disappeared in February. Chen in September 2021 resurfaced on his friend’s live video feed on YouTube, saying he had suffered from depression. But he did not provide details about his disappearance. Another citizen journalist, Zhang Zhan, who also had reported on the early stage of the outbreak, was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of picking fights and provoking trouble in December 2020. About eight months later, her lawyer said she was in ill health after staging a long-running hunger strike.

Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan.

Genetic samples from the market were recently uploaded to an international database and then removed after scientists asked China about them. An international team of virus experts said on Thursday that they had found genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade. The genetic data was drawn from swabs taken from in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market starting in January 2020, shortly after the Chinese authorities had shut down the market because of suspicions that it was linked to the outbreak of a new virus. By then, the animals had been cleared out, but researchers swabbed walls, floors, metal cages and carts often used for transporting animal cages. In samples that came back positive for the coronavirus, the international research team found genetic material belonging to animals, including large amounts that were a match for the raccoon dog, three scientists involved in the analysis said. The jumbling together of genetic material from the virus and the animal does not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected. And even if a raccoon dog had been infected, it would not be clear that the animal had spread the virus to people. Another animal could have passed the virus to people, or someone infected with the virus could have spread the virus to a raccoon dog. But the analysis did establish that raccoon dogs — fluffy animals that are related to foxes and are known to be able to transmit the coronavirus — deposited genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the virus was left, the three scientists said. That evidence, they said, was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.

Two new studies say the virus was present in animals at the Huanan seafood market in 2019. Scientists released a pair of extensive studies on Saturday that point to a market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Analyzing data from a variety of sources, they concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus twice spilled over into people working or shopping there. They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.  “When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both studies.

The two reports have not yet been published in a scientific journal that would require undergoing peer review. Together, they represent a significant salvo in the debate over the beginnings of a pandemic that has killed nearly 6 million people globally and sickened more than 400 million. The question of whether the coronavirus outbreak began with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way has given rise to pitched geopolitical battles and debates over how best to stop the next pandemic. But some outside scientists who have been hesitant to endorse the market origin hypothesis said they remained unconvinced. Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said in an interview that there remained a glaring absence of direct evidence that animals at the market had themselves been infected with the coronavirus. “I think what they’re arguing could be true,” Dr. Bloom said of the new studies. “But I don’t think the quality of the data is sufficient to say that any of these scenarios are true with confidence.” In their new study, Dr. Worobey and his colleagues present evidence that wild mammals that might have harbored the coronavirus were being sold in December 2019. But no wildlife was left at the market by the time Chinese researchers arrived in early 2020 to collect genetic samples...

Preprints cited available at (Feb.25, 2022)

https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YhsH6e7MKLH

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1

Millions of people in Wuhan will be tested for the novel coronavirus within the coming days, after a new cluster of cases emerged despite a strict 76-day lockdown that was intended to eliminate the virus. Over the weekend, six new cases were reported in the city, the first in 35 consecutive days. None of the new cases were imported from overseas, sparking concern that the infection could still be spreading in the city where the virus is thought to have first emerged. In response to the outbreak, authorities in Wuhan will conduct city-wide nucleic acid testing over a period of 10 days, according to an emergency notice issued by local authorities and circulated by state run media outlet The Paper.

Nucleic acid tests work by detecting the virus' genetic code, and can be more effective at detecting the infection, particularly in the early stages, than tests which examine a body's immune response, though the latter are easier to conduct. The ambitious screening drive, described in the report as a "ten-day battle," could see up to 11 million people tested -- more than the entire population of Greece. Wuhan was the first city in the world to enter into lockdown and great effort has been expended in an attempt to eliminate the virus.

A small number of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) have been described in children,1,2 and our understanding of the spectrum of illness is limited.3 We conducted a retrospective analysis involving hospitalized children in Wuhan, China.  SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was detected in 6 patients (1.6%). Informed consent was obtained from the parents or guardians of the patients with Covid-19 for the publication of their clinical data. The dates of illness onset in the six patients with Covid-19 were between January 2 and January 8, 2020.

The median age of the six patients was 3 years. All six children had previously been completely healthy. Common clinical characteristics included high fever (>39°C) (in all six patients), cough (in all six), and vomiting (in four). Laboratory investigations showed that the levels of lymphocytes, white cells, and neutrophils were below the normal range in six, four, and three patients, respectively. Four of the six patients had pneumonia, as assessed radiographically, with computed tomographic scans of the chest showing typical viral pneumonia patterns. One child was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (ICU) and received pooled immune globulin from healthy donors. All the patients were treated empirically with antiviral agents, antibiotic agents, and supportive therapies. All the patients recovered after hospitalization for a median of 7.5 days.

This study showed that Covid-19 occurred in children, causing moderate-to-severe respiratory illness, in the early phase of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Wuhan and was associated with ICU admission in one patient.  Our findings indicate that SARS-CoV-2 infections in children were occurring early in the epidemic...

How contagious is the virus?

The scale of an outbreak depends on how quickly and easily a virus is transmitted from person to person. While research has just begun, scientists have estimated that each person with the Wuhan coronavirus could infect somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. That would make the new virus roughly as contagious as SARS, another coronavirus that circulated in China in 2003 and was contained after it sickened 8,098 people and killed 774. Respiratory viruses like these can travel through the air, enveloped in tiny droplets that are produced when a sick person breathes, talks, coughs or sneezes. These droplets fall to the ground within a few feet. That makes the virus harder to get than pathogens like measles, chickenpox and tuberculosis, which can travel a hundred feet through the air. But it is easier to catch than H.I.V. or hepatitis, which spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.

How contagious is the virus?

The scale of an outbreak depends on how quickly and easily a virus is transmitted from person to person. While research has just begun, scientists have estimated that each person with the Wuhan coronavirus could infect somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. That would make the new virus roughly as contagious as SARS, another coronavirus that circulated in China in 2003 and was contained after it sickened 8,098 people and killed 774. Respiratory viruses like these can travel through the air, enveloped in tiny droplets that are produced when a sick person breathes, talks, coughs or sneezes. These droplets fall to the ground within a few feet. That makes the virus harder to get than pathogens like measles, chickenpox and tuberculosis, which can travel a hundred feet through the air. But it is easier to catch than H.I.V. or hepatitis, which spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.....

Additional information from study published in New England J. Medicine (Jan. 29, 2020):

https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316

(Last Update March 16,  2020, 11:30 pm, Pacific Standard Time)

Global Infections:182407

Infections Outside China: 101356

Global Deaths: 7154

Countries & territories affected: 148

March 16, 2020 - Largest ever one-day drop of the U.S. stock market (3000 points). Moderna therapeutic doses its first patient, a healthy volunteer in Seattle, with an experimental mRNA vaccine. 28000 infections in Italy and 10000 in Spain. 4700 cases in U.S., where Trump releases new guidelines, including avoiding eating at restaurants and public places, and gatherings of more than 10 people. Iceland performs widespread testing of its population. Venezuela imposes nation-wide quarantine, and Philippines quarantines the entire island of Luzon (57 million). Imported cases into China continue rising. Liberia, Somalia and Tanzania report firs cases.

March 15, 2020 - For the first time global infections outside China exceed infections in China. 25000 cases and 1800 deaths in Italy. In Madrid (Spain) cases are doubling every 2 days, one of the fastest rates on record at this moment. CDC recommends to avoid gatherings of 50 or more in the U.S. NY and Washington states order restaurants and bars to close. The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates to near zero. First cases reported in Bahamas, Central African Republic, Guinea, Northern Cyprus, and Uzbekistan.

March 14, 2020 - Europe has become the center of the epidemics with over 45000 cases reported. Italy remains the country with the highest density of COVID19 cases, with over 21000 confirmed infections (0.03% population). Spain reports over 1500 new cases in 24h, despite most citizens remain at home and few are being tested. All contiguous US states and Alaska have reported COVID-19. Citizens of U.K. and Ireland added to the list of countries restricted to travel to the U.S. Lancet study suggest that fatality rates in symptomatic patients may have been largely underestimated at the peak of the outbreak. First cases reported in Equatorial Guinea, Namibia, Seychelles, Sudan, and Venezuela.

March 13, 2020 - First cases reported in Aruba, Cayman Islands, Eswatini (Swaziland), Ethiopia, Gabon, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Kenia, Kosovo, Mauritania, Suriname, and Uruguay. U.S. and Spain declare National emergencies. U.S. releases $50 billion to fight the outbreak at a time when 46 people have already died and 22000 schools are closed. Criteria for testing in the U.S. is revised. In Spain, with over 5000 cases, everybody is asked to stay at home for 15 days. South Korea’s cases continue to lower, whereas Europe reports more daily cases than China at its peak. Apple reopens stores in China. First Chinese case of COVID-19 now tracked back to November 17...

The first confirmed U.S. case of a traveler infected with the virus behind China’s continuing pneumonia outbreak has health authorities on alert to prevent it from spreading. The patient—a man in his 30s—returned from the country’s city of Wuhan (where the virus appears to have originated) to his home in Snohomish County in Washington State on January 15. He developed symptoms and sought treatment from his doctor on January 19, and a day later, a real time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) test confirmed he had the virus. The patient appears to be doing well and was being treated this week at a hospital in Everett, Wash., and placed in isolation out of an abundance of caution, said a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a news briefing on Tuesday afternoon.

The virus, called 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), is known to have infected hundreds of people so far, and Chinese authorities have now reported at least 17 deaths. It was first identified in Wuhan late last year and is believed to have jumped from animals to humans at a local seafood market that also sold other wild animal meat. Authorities have since confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission. The pathogen is a coronavirus, a member of a family of viruses that include severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which caused major outbreaks in 2003 and 2012, respectively. Cases of 2019-nCoV have been confirmed in several other countries, including Thailand, Japan and South Korea. Three U.S. airports—in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City—began screening travelers from Wuhan last week. Such measures have now been expanded to two more airports—in Atlanta and Chicago—and passengers traveling to the U.S. from Wuhan will be funneled to those five locations. The risk to the U.S. public is low at this time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the agency says it is working closely with other health organizations to contain the virus’s spread. 

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci has been been closely following developments related to the new virus. Scientific American spoke with Fauci about 2019-nCoV’s likely mode of transmission, its similarity to other coronaviruses and the question of whether a vaccine is on the horizon....

More than 100 staffers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are being deployed to three US airports to check passengers arriving from Wuhan, China, for fever and other symptoms of a mysterious new virus that's killed two and infected dozens in China, the CDC announced Friday. It's a highly unusual step. The last time the CDC did routine passenger health screening was during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, according to Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC's division of global migration and quarantine. "I've been here since 1996, and that's the only other time we've ever done this -- for Ebola," Cetron said.

Scientists suggest GISAID, a virus sequence database, is rewriting pandemic history. When GISAID, the widely used database for influenza and SARS-CoV-2 genomes, issued a statement last week about a set of controversial sequences from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, the release explained by way of background that the repository was “an essential contributor to global health” trusted by thousands of data contributors from 215 nations and territories. But GISAID also included a claim that has been puzzling and infuriating some virologists for 3 years: It was the place where the first SARS-CoV-2 genomes were publicly shared, on 10 January 2020. That claim challenges contemporaneous news and social media accounts, the memories of many researchers contacted by Science, and non-GISAID records that all indicate the first sequence was made available through virological.org, a forum where scientists share and discuss information, early on 11 January in Europe, which was the evening of 10 January in the United States. It had been submitted by Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist and virologist at the University of Sydney who had received the sequence from Zhang Yong-Zhen, a virologist at Fudan University. GISAID, various information sources suggest, didn’t actually make its first genomes of the new coronavirus public until 12 January 2020. “I am very surprised” at GISAID’s claims, Zhang wrote in an email to Science. “I could not understand why some people attempted to rewrite the history.” GISAID Vice President and registered in-house council Ben Branda stood by its chronology in a lengthy email responding to questions from Science. He said the notion that the Zhang genome came first is “inaccurate” and based on “misinformation.”

Who exactly revealed SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code to the world may seem like a trivial issue. But the debate isn’t about scientific glory, according to Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen. He calls GISAID’s version of events “deeply problematic” and says it could undermine trust in the database, which has played an essential role in charting the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and the rise of variants. As for Holmes, he says he would gladly credit GISAID if it was indeed first. “It’s not an ego thing,” he says. “But I have seen absolutely no evidence of their claim.” The release of the first SARS-CoV-2 genome was the subject of an intense behind-the-scenes tussle in China, where several laboratories had sequenced the virus by early January 2020. Zhang’s lab, which had long collaborated with Holmes, received a sample from a COVID-19 patient on 3 January and had a sequence ready on 5 January, which Zhang uploaded that day to GenBank, a public database run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). But he did so without making it immediately visible to others. China was reportedly keeping tight control on any SARS-CoV-2 information and had banned researchers there from making the sequence public. Zhang, Holmes, and colleagues also sent a paper about the new virus to Nature on 7 January, according to the submission date on the final manuscript. On 8 January, The Wall Street Journal became the first media outlet to report that the outbreak in Wuhan was caused by a new coronavirus and that Chinese researchers had sequenced it, but the article didn’t identify which ones. Worried by the delay in sharing the viral genome, seen as key to developing diagnostics, vaccines, and drugs, Holmes had a “series of frantic calls” with Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, on 9 January, as Farrar wrote in his book Spike: The Virus vs. The People—the Inside Story. The two decided Holmes would put pressure on Zhang to go public with the sequence while Farrar would urge George Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), to do the same with genomes they believed the agency had....

The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus.

Scientist who found archived online files of removed NIH data says recovered information may clarify how coronavirus entered humans.  In a world starved for any fresh data to help clarify the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, a study claiming to have unearthed early sequences of SARS-CoV-2 that were deliberately hidden was bound to ignite a sizzling debate. The unreviewed paper, by evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, asserts that a team of Chinese researchers sampled viruses from some of the earliest COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, posted the viral sequences to a widely used U.S. database, and then a few months later had the genetic information removed to “obscure their existence.” To some scientists, the claims reinforce suspicions that China has something to hide about the origins of the pandemic. But critics of the preprint, posted yesterday on bioRxiv, say Bloom’s detective work is much ado about nothing, because the Chinese scientists later published the viral information in a different form, and the recovered sequences add little to what’s known about SARS-CoV-2’s origins. The sequences, Bloom says, do support other evidence that the pandemic did not originate in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market, where SARS-CoV-2 initially came to light. Chinese health officials on 31 December 2019  tied the market to an outbreak of an “unexplained pneumonia,” but a month later, it had become clear that many of the earliest cases had no link to the location. The paper highlights three mutations found in SARS-CoV-2 collected from patients linked to the market that are not in the unearthed sequences of the coronavirus or its closest relative, which researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered in bats in 2013. 

Bloom’s more explosive assertion, that the Chinese researchers deleted data, is bound to intensify the debate about whether the virus originally jumped to humans from an unknown animal or somehow leaked from a laboratory. Bloom says he has no bias toward a particular origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2, and he agrees that the viral sequences he highlighted are a small piece of a large unfinished puzzle. “I don't think this bolsters either the lab origin or zoonosis hypothesis,” he says. “I think it provides additional evidence that this virus was probably circulating in Wuhan before December, certainly, and that probably, we have a less than complete picture of the sequences of the early viruses.” Bloom, who studies viral evolution, launched his study after a controversial report on the pandemic’s origin issued in March by a joint commission of Chinese and foreign researchers organized by the World Health Organization (WHO).  Bloom helped organize a much discussed letter, co-signed by 17 other scientists, that criticized the WHO report for deeming it “extremely unlikely” that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a laboratory. In the letter, published on 14 May in Science, the authors argued for “a dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue.”

The WHO report relied heavily on sequences of SARS-CoV-2 found in COVID-19 patients tied to the market, Bloom notes. “I was just going through and trying to repeat a number of the analyses in the joint WHO-China report,” Bloom says. This led him to a study that listed all SARS-CoV-2 sequences submitted before 31 March 2020 to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), a database overseen by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). But when he checked SRA for one of the listed projects, he couldn’t find its sequences.

Googling some of the project’s information, he found another study, led by Ming Wang from Wuhan University’s Renmin Hospital, that was posted as a preprint on 6 March on medRxiv, and later published, on 24 June, in Small, a journal more focused on materials and chemistry than virology. That paper lists some of the earliest Wuhan COVID-19 patients and the specific mutations in their viruses, but doesn’t give the full sequence data. Further internet sleuthing led Bloom to discover that SRA backs up its information in Google’s Cloud platform, and a search there turned up files containing some of the earlier data submissions from Wang's team. The paper in Small makes no mention of any corrections to viral sequences that might explain why they were removed from SRA, which led Bloom to conclude in his preprint that “the trusting structures of science have been abused to obscure sequences relevant to the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan.” Bloom asserts that because the deleted sequences lack the three mutations seen in the SARS-CoV-2 from the seafood market, the viruses Wang’s team found more likely represent a progenitor. But the sequence of that bat virus found in 2013 differs from SARS-CoV-2 by about 1100 nucleotides, which means decades must have passed before it evolved into the pandemic coronavirus—and other species may well have been infected with the bat virus before it made the final jump into people. This great difference in sequences, says evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh, means researchers cannot use a few mutations like the ones Bloom highlights to look back in time to see the “roots” of the family tree of SARS-CoV-2 tree.

Bloom says he contacted the Chinese researchers to ask why they removed the SRA data, but they did not reply. (Science also received no reply after emailing the lead authors.) NIH issued a statement today saying it removed the sequences at the request of the submitting investigator, who the agency says holds the rights to the data. The scientist “indicated the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues,” NIH said.  (Bloom says he cannot find the sequences in any other virology database he knows.) Researchers are sharply divided about the value of Bloom’s resurrection of the SRA data. “This is a creative and rigorous approach to investigating the provenance of SARS-CoV-2,” says Ian Lipkin, a microbiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “The two take-home points are that the virus was circulating before the outbreak linked to the Wuhan seafood market and that there may have been active suppression of epidemiological and sequence data needed to track its origin.”

Leaving aside the meaning of the sequences Bloom found, the demonstration that researchers can potentially find “new” data in the cloud is an exciting advance, adds Sudhir Kumar, who does genomics research at Temple University and has published his own analysis of early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, “Many people feel that there is a lot more Chinese data out there, and they don't have access to it,” he says. Others are underwhelmed. “Jesse is resurfacing info that’s been online for over a year and claiming it proves a cover-up,” says Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah. “I don’t understand [his reasoning].”  The Small paper is simply a good study that “unfortunately flew below the radar,” he adds. Rambaut notes that the Chinese researchers submitted their Small paper before requesting SRA remove the data. “The idea that the group was trying to hide something is farcical,” Rambaut says. “If they were covering something [up] they surely would have not submitted the paper. … I don't like the insinuations about malfeasance where [Bloom] has zero knowledge of the reasons the authors of the paper had for removing their data.”

A member of the WHO origin commission, Marion Koopmans from the Erasmus University Medical Center, notes that its report stresses the need to find more data about the earliest viruses in circulation. “It’s good to see additional data, but I’m not sure what point this makes,” Koopmans says, adding that the preprint’s accusations could harm future collaborations on origin studies with Chinese researchers. “The tone of the intro is in my view rather suggestive and I wish science would stay away from this.” Bloom acknowledges that researchers can piece together the coronavirus sequences from the data found in the Small paper, but he says that’s not the way most in the field conduct evolutionary analyses of SARS-CoV-2. “No one knew about these sequences because the way that people find sequences is to go to the sequence databases and download the sequences and look at them,” Bloom says.   Stepping into the divisive discussion of SARS-CoV-2’s origin comes at a price, he acknowledges. “So many people have agendas and preconceived notions on this topic that if you open your mouth on the topic, someone's going to take what you've said to support or reject some particular narrative,” he says. “So the choices are either not to say anything at all, which I don't think is useful or productive, or just to try to draw the conclusions you can and make it as transparent as possible. No matter how much people like [my new study] or don't like it, or agree with the interpretation or disagree with the interpretation, they can at least go download it and repeat it themselves.”

Published in Science (June 23, 2021):

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk1383 

Preprint of the research cited available in bioRxiv (June 22, 2021):

https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051 

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first reported in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spread worldwide. Previous studies suggested cat could be a potential susceptible animal of SARS-CoV-2.

Here, we investigated the infection of SARS-CoV-2 in cats by detecting specific serum antibodies. A cohort of serum samples were collected from cats in Wuhan, including 102 sampled after COVID-19 outbreak, and 39 prior to the outbreak. 15 of 102 (14.7%) cat sera collected after the outbreak were positive for the receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 by indirect enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).

Among the positive samples, 11 had SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies with a titer ranging from 1/20 to 1/1080. No serological cross-reactivity was detected between the SARS-CoV-2 and type I or II feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV). Our data demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 has infected cat population in Wuhan during the outbreak.

Preprint Available at bioRXV (April 3, 2020):

https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.01.021196

The repatriation of 565 Japanese citizens from Wuhan, China, in late January offered scientists an unexpected opportunity to learn a bit more about the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) raging in that city. To avoid domestic spread of the virus, Japanese officials screened every passenger for disease symptoms and tested them for the virus after they landed. Eight tested positive, but four of those had no symptoms at all, says epidemiologist Hiroshi Nishiura of Hokkaido University, Sapporo—which is a bright red flag for epidemiologists who are trying to figure out what the fast-moving epidemic has in store for humanity. If many infections go unnoticed, as the Japanese finding suggests, that vastly complicates efforts to contain the outbreak.

Two months after 2019-nCoV emerged—and with well over 20,000 cases and 427 deaths as Science went to press—mathematical modelers have been racing to predict where the virus will move next, how big a toll it might ultimately take, and whether isolating patients and limiting travel will slow it. But to make confident predictions, they need to know much more about how easily the virus spreads, how sick it makes people, and whether infected people with no symptoms can still infect others.

Some of that information is coming out of China. But amid the all-out battle to control the virus, and with diagnostic capabilities in short supply, Chinese researchers cannot answer all the questions. Countries with just a handful of cases, such as Japan, can also reveal important data, says Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. “It's up to all countries now that receive cases to collect as much information as possible.”...

EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak speaks with The Scientist about how pathogens like 2019-nCoV jump species, and how to head off the next pandemic. An outbreak of a new virus known as 2019-nCoV, which began in Wuhan, China, in December, has now sickened more than 900 people and killed at least 26. Efforts to contain the outbreak have caused major disruption in China, particularly in Wuhan and nearby cities, where authorities have stopped most forms of transportation. While researchers quickly identified and sequenced 2019-nCoV, many questions remain about the novel coronavirus, including which species first passed it to humans.

The Scientist spoke with Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and an infectious disease researcher who’s done extensive research on emerging viruses in China and elsewhere. He talked with us about how 2019-nCoV fits in with other coronaviruses, including the virus that causes SARS, and how future events might be prevented. 

Peter Daszak: There’s a lot being done on how coronaviruses infect people from animals, because we’ve had a few events where they’ve jumped from animals into people, including from livestock. So for MERS, we know the real key is to know what the host cell receptor is—that’s the protein on the surface of cells that viruses bind to and invade. So if we share the same cell surface receptor that the virus uses in bats or in camels or in pigs, then there’s a risk of that virus invading us. For SARS coronavirus, the cell surface receptor is called ACE2, angiotensin converting enzyme 2. We share that with bats, and [the virus] uses the same receptor [in bats and humans]. And . . . because this paper . . . just came out from the Wuhan [Institute of Virology] group, we now know that the new virus also uses that same surface receptor....

(NOTE: the findings below, originally published in the J. Medical Virology, have been widely DISPUTED by others in the field) 

Snakes -- the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra -- may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter. The many-banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), also known as the Taiwanese krait or the Chinese krait, is a highly venomous species of elapid snake found in much of central and southern China and Southeast Asia. The illness was first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a major city in central China, and has been rapidly spreading. Since then, sick travelers from Wuhan have infected people in China and other countries, including the United States.

Using samples of the virus isolated from patients, scientists in China have determined the genetic code of the virus and used microscopes to photograph it. The pathogen responsible for this pandemic is a new coronavirus. It's in the same family of viruses as the well-known severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which have killed hundreds of people in the past 17 years. The World Health Organization (WHO) has named the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV....

Published in the Journal of Medical Virology (22 January 2020):

https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.25682

Chinese health authorities have confirmed that the deadly new virus sweeping through the country can be spread from person to person, the World Health Organization said it would consider declaring an international public health emergency. Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory expert and the man who helped control the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2002 to 2003, told state media that two people in Guangdong province in southern China caught the disease, a novel coronavirus, from family members. Health authorities in the central city of Wuhan, where a seafood market has been identified as the centre of the outbreak, said on Tuesday that an 89-year-old man became the fourth person to die from the virus. China’s National Health Commission also reported that 14 health workers have been infected but did not give any more details.