The new coronavirus strain identified in the United Kingdom presents different mutations. Alma Bracho, FISABIO researcher, explains.
The word science has never been as present in the media as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, and if this continues to be the case in the coming months, it is very likely that something will remain even after the coronavirus disappears.
Can an extraterrestrial organism produce a catastrophic pandemic on our planet? Such a question arises every time we consider bringing samples from other worlds in the Solar System, especially now, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
An epidemic like the one we have unfortunately experienced can bring out people's worst fears. Cinema and literature have successfully used fear to write scripts in which an epidemic is the heart of the story or the underlying excuse.
Embracing an evolutionary perspective thus helps to explain why men and women react differently to certain infectious diseases and to understand (and combat) the strategies of viruses in their relentless evolutionary race to infect and spread among us.
Every historical period has had its epidemic executioner, and it has almost always been the ecological changes between human communities and the environment that have caused changes in pathogenicity and epidemic diseases.
Early criticism of COVID-19 rhetoric cautions against the use of war metaphors that can shift us toward authoritarian and nationalistic sentiment, evoking xenophobia and racism.
In addition to protective isolation, enhanced medical capacity, safer sociality and health oriented economic stimulus, we will need to turn our hearts, hands, and minds to reweaving and strengthening the complex and vital social web.
At the time of publication of this issue, we are incredulously, insecurely, and helplessly witnessing a situation only comparable to that experienced in both twentieth-century World Wars. A global pandemic, which has once again placed the human species before a scenario that is as unprecedented and unknown as it is unpredictable.
The biochemist Vicent Pelechano, together with his team in Sweden, has developed a simple, fast, and affordable method to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus in patients. He explains in this interview.