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COVID Booster: climate change and bungling politicians
Five things science learned about COVID last week.
Did climate change help SARS-CoV-2?
A new study published in the journal
Science of the Total Environment has provided the first evidence of how climate change could have played a direct role in the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: global greenhouse gas emissions over the last century have made southern China a hotspot for bat-borne coronaviruses, by driving growth of bats’ preferred forest habitat.
“Understanding how the global distribution of bat species has shifted as a result of climate change may be an important step in reconstructing the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak,” says the University of Cambridge’s Robert Beyer, first author of the study.
TORONTO, Ontario (CTV News) One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all familiar with the “spike protein” – the thorny protrusions that allow the novel coronavirus to attach itself to the cells of its human host.
Images of the SARS-CoV-2 virus give prominence to the spikes. They’re even a memorable part of the design of the “Mr. Covid” character in Alberta’s hit public health ad campaign.
Here’s the thing, though: the virus is changing the shape of the spikes to get around the defences our immune systems are mounting against it.
That helps explain why the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the United Kingdom seems to be more infectious: Its spike proteins have a slightly different shape, which makes them able to evade immune responses that catch more widely circulating forms of the virus.