A big threat that no one is talking about? Covid spillback

This means that the threat posed by spillback needs to be mitigated in some way. The problem is complex and scientists tend to unanimously agree that governments need to spend more resources managing this particular risk, but disagree on the exact strategy needed. .. According to Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, the focus should be on monitoring Covid-19 infections in domesticated animals and domesticated pets. Since these creatures are in constant contact with humans, bidirectional infections can occur. Much higher.

“At this point, I think these are the animal species of greatest concern,” he says. “The likelihood of contact, and changes in the virus, are likely to be subsequently returned to humans.”

In the United States, government agencies have already begun initiatives to address this. The United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) monitors both livestock and wildlife. The agency closely monitors farmed mink and other species that live close to humans. This includes fox squirrels, raccoons, deer frogs, white-tailed deer, and rabbits, some of which have already demonstrated the ability to spread the virus within species in laboratory settings.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many research teams around the world have investigated cats, dogs, hamsters and other livestock to assess the prevalence of Covid-19. Virologist Kaitlin Sawatzki is working on one such project at Tufts University, Massachusetts. “So far, we’ve tested 2,455 species of animals since March 2020,” she says.

About 5% of Sawatsuki animals were Covid-19 positive. This is comparable to discoveries elsewhere in the world, she says. However, while this work is important, she believes that monitoring wildlife populations is much more important in terms of preventing problematic spillback events, if pets or livestock become infected. , Preventing continuous infection with mutant viruses is relatively easy. ..

“Pets tend to stay home, so I’m not too worried about the pandemic going on,” she says. “My bigger concern is that if Sars-CoV-2 can spread to wildlife and continue to infect within the species, it’s out of the control of your dog.”

As a result, Sawatzki is leading another initiative, working with 22 wildlife rehab facilities across the United States to accept and return injured animals to the wild. To date, 673 wild animals have been screened to see if facility workers are infected with Covid-19. “Everything was negative so far, but if we find a positive test, we’ll immediately report it to state and federal authorities,” she says.

Finding the wildlife at highest risk of infection with Covid-19 and returning its subspecies to humans may sound like looking for a proverbial needle in a haystack, but with a high degree of artificial intelligence. The tool has already provided important support to scientists such as Fagre and Sawatzki.Created earlier this year by Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Ecosystem Institute in New York. Computer model This predicted the potential for different species to carry Sars-CoV-2 and effectively infect between them. ACE2, the receptor that viruses use to invade cells, is found throughout the animal kingdom, but some animals bind to this receptor more strongly than others.

“In order for a host to become infected and able to infect, the virus must invade and replicate in the cell, and then all new viruses leave the cell,” says Han. “But these things don’t happen unless there are strong bonds that depend on the structure of ACE2, which varies from species to species, so depending on how ACE2 looks in all these different species We have created this model to calculate the expected bond strength, which allows us to predict whether it could ultimately cause an infection that could affect humans. It was. “