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This week in COVID-19 news, scientists tested how well various face coverings, including a neck gaiter, blocked respiratory droplets from the wearer’s mouth and nose were discovered, authorities discovered SARS-CoV-2 genetic material on frozen cock wings , and researchers described a nasal spray they say they can block viral infection. But you have not seen these headers on Medscape. Here’s why.
Gaiters
Researchers from Duke University are developing a method to test how many respiratory drops a person emits when wearing a face mask. The method used a laser, a prism, a box and a smartphone camera. She described the setup and her results of tests of 14 different face covers in the magazine Science Advances. The particular tests, the authors write, “should only serve as a demonstration,” because they expect different people to get different results with the same mask, due to variation in factors such as their physiology, how well the mask fits, head position, and speech pattern.
But that is not what headlines have said about this study. The coverage of many news items underscores one of the hefty facial features: a neck fleece or gaiter. In the researchers’ test, the speaker appears to emit slightly more drops when wearing this face mask than when not wearing a face mask, although the error bars overlap in the figure depicting the number of drops in the tests.
It takes a lot of extrapolation to make a claim about gaiters in general from the single test described in this study, and the general point of the researchers that face coverings differ in their effectiveness has been shown earlier. We mentioned this study – and the discussion about it – in our daily COVID-19 Update, but we did not dedicate an entire story to it because its findings are not new.
Chicken wings
Genetic material from SARS-CoV-2 was discovered on the surface of frozen rooster wings imported to China from Brazil, local authorities said. CNN reported that the tests did not assess whether the virus was infected. Health authorities tracked down people who may have been in contact with the frozen wings, and no one tested positive for the virus.
This chicken report is not the first of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material apparently found on frozen foods, and it does not change the overall balance of evidence on how COVID-19 spreads – mainly through person-to-person interaction. who is infected. We did not think this story was a priority for our readers.
Antiviral nasal spray
In a preprint posted to bioRxiv.org, University of California, San Francisco scientists describe how they develop nanobodies – like antibodies, but smaller ones – that bind to the parts of SARS-CoV-2 that ‘ t interact with the receptors of a cell to enter and infect it. They report that the nanobodies they construct demonstrate “exceptional potential” in SARS-CoV-2 could be neutralized in vitro and aerosolized for potential delivery via a nasal spray or nebulizer.
“These properties could enable aerosol-mediated delivery of this potent neutralizer directly to the airway epithelia, and promise a widely deployable, patient-friendly prophylactic and / or early infection therapeutic agent to stem the worst pandemic in a century,” the researchers write. .
We hope so too, but there is a long way to go. We did not treat this because we do not want to hype experimental treatment that may not have been tested in animal models, much less in clinical trials, before it is even out of the lab or peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.
Ellie Kincaid is the associate managing editor of Medscape. She has previously written about health care for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Nature Medicine. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ellie_kincaid.
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