According to a study by researchers at Kansas State University, mosquitoes cannot transmit the new coronavirus. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) released this information to the public at the beginning of the pandemic, the researchers spent time researching three common mosquito species to provide conclusive data on their notion. “To date, there has been no information or evidence to suggest that the new coronavirus may be transmitted by mosquitoes,” the WHO said on its COVID-19 page “mythbusters.” In response to this idea, the researchers said, “While the World Health Organization has definitively stated that mosquitoes cannot transmit the virus, our study is the first to provide conclusive data supporting the theory,” adding that they demonstrated that even under extreme conditions, the SARS-CoV-2 virus cannot replicate in these mosquitoes and therefore cannot be transmitted to people, even in the unlikely event that a mosquito feeds on a viraemic host. ” In their results, the researchers tested three species of mosquitoes: Ae. Aegypti, Ae. Albopictus and Cx. Quinquefasciatus (all present in China) – and it was determined through intrathoracic inoculation with SARS-CoV-2 that the virus loses the Infectivity during the “retention period.” No virus was detected in the 277 inoculated mosquitoes, through tests conducted beyond a 24-hour period. Of 48 mosquitoes tested exactly 24 hours from after inoculation, only one contained infectious traces of the new disease. ” The most extreme approach to mosquito viral challenge, namely intrathoracic inoculation, was used as a final test of SARS-CoV-2’s ability to infect and replicate in mosquitoes, “the study authors wrote in the magazine Nature. “The hypothesis was that if the virus did not replicate in mosquitoes after intrathoracic inoculation, even if the mosquitoes fed on viremic people and the virus spread from the midgut, the lack of replication would impede the possibility of biological transmission.” . Given the lack of detectable infectious viruses in any of the 277 samples collected at all times beyond 24 h after inoculation, we conclude that SARS-CoV-2 cannot replicate in mosquitoes and that even if a mosquito is it feeds on a person with virus in the blood, that the mosquito would not be a vector if it were fed on a naive host “, they concluded.
