Disaster number one: You can practically smell the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 massing microscopically.Then there's disaster number two.Just like real life, because what can anyone do, really.Arguably no sci-fi writer has the specific combination of vision, reach, and ardent fandom that Stephenson does.
The most significant detail the group added was its apparent dismissal of the controversial laboratory release hypothesis , which Ben Embarek called “extremely unlikely.” The declaration was a boost to Beijing’s version of events, which has peddled unsubstantiated claims that SARS-CoV-2 could have originated outside of China, and kicked off a new round of geopolitical bickering over who should shoulder the blame for Covid-19 becoming a global pandemic.
For months, these researchers had been periodically doing similar genomic surveillance work to keep tabs on the dozens of strains of SARS-CoV-2 that were circulating around the country, looking for any problematic mutations in the virus’s spike protein.
On Wednesday, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals published what many took to be a disheartening result: According to some headlines, a 6,000-person randomized controlled trial in Denmark had found that wearing a mask does not offer any clear protection from being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic , scientists have been saying that if the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, sticks around long enough, people are likely to catch it more than once.On Monday, researchers at Hong Kong University presented the first confirmation that this can, in fact, happen with SARS-CoV-2.
Lock It Out. Each particle of the new virus, SARS-CoV-2, is studded with spikes, which allow it to attach itself to a human cell, poke a hole, and burrow inside.
But when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, “because this is such a new infection, we’re not sure how long those antibodies hang around for,” says Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative.
Scientists are still trying to figure out if the same is true for Covid-19, or if the coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 is actually invading the nervous system directly.If the coronavirus is breaching the blood-brain barrier and infecting neurons, that could make it harder to find effective treatments.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, a novel coronavirus , has exploded out of China and spread the disease Covid-19 around the world.And the swine flu pandemic of 2009 infected between 11 and 21 percent of the global population, but was far less deadly, killing at most around half a million people.
Because Carson’s company is called Covid, and as of Tuesday, so is the disease caused by that new coronavirus.And per the Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (in a preprint, so not peer reviewed, but likely to be cleared), the microbe itself is now called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2.Not much better?