Back in the early 1990s, Nathaniel Landau was a young virologist just starting his career in HIV research. But he and his colleagues were already on the verge of a landmark breakthrough. Several labs around the world were hot on his team's tail.
"We were sleeping in the lab, just to keep the work going day and night because there were many labs all racing against each other," Landau says. "Of course, we wanted to be the first to do it. We were totally stressed out."
Other scientists had identified groups of people who appeared to be completely resistant to HIV. "People who knew they had been exposed to HIV multiple times, mainly through unprotected sex, yet they clearly were not infected," Landau explains.
And so the race was on to figure out why: "Are these people just lucky or did they really have a mutation in their genes that was protecting them from infection?'" he asks.
Now 25 years later, scientists all over the world are trying to answer the same question but about a different virus: SARS-CoV-2.
By this point in the pandemic, most Americans have had at least one bout of COVID. For children under age 18, more than 80% of them have been infected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
But just as with HIV, some people have been exposed multiple times but never had symptoms and never tested positive.
"We've heard countless anecdotes about nurses and health-care workers, being exposed without any protection and remaining negative over and over again," says pediatrician Jean-Laurent Casanova, who studies the genetics of viral resistance at Rockefeller University. "Or people share a household with someone who's been coughing for a couple of weeks, and one person stays negative."
So why haven't these people caught COVID? .
After two years of hunting, a team at the University of California, San Francisco has come pretty close to answering the question. READ MORE...
The COVID wave crashing across China right now not only threatens the billion-and-a-half Chinese. It also poses a serious danger to the rest of the world.
Leaving aside the risk to already fragile global supply chains, there’s a chance that the surge of infections in China will give the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen ample opportunity to mutate into some new and more dangerous variant. If that happens, the progress the world has made against COVID since vaccines became widely available in late 2020 could slow, if not reverse.
“There’s the distinct possibility that things will get out of control in China,” John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California-Berkeley's School of Public Health, told The Daily Beast. “If that happens,” Swartzberg added, “there will be a remarkable amount of viral reproduction occurring in people and this will increase the possibility of problematic variants being produced.”
Experts disagree just how likely it is that the next major variant—“lineage” is the scientific term—might emerge in China. Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at The University of Hong Kong, said the next major lineage may come from countries where the virus has already swept through the population. Somewhere in Europe, or the U.S.
But there are unique dynamics that boost the chances of a new SARS-CoV-2 lineage appearing in China. The Chinese population is huge—and might be way less protected against infection and thus viral mutation than, say, Americans or Europeans.
This disparity is partly the consequence of China’s earlier success against COVID. For more than two years, the Chinese government and health establishment managed to suppress the novel-coronavirus. This despite the pathogen likely originating at a meat market in Wuhan in east-central China in late 2019.
Thanks to China’s frequently severe limits on crowds and travel daily, the country went two years with practically no COVID. Yes, there were a few tens of thousands of cases across the vast country during the initial wave of infections in the spring of 2020. But after that, almost nothing. So few cases that the 150 or so daily new infections authorities logged in mid-January 2021 qualified as a surge. READ MORE...
