Thread by @DrEricDing

📍Scientists have discovered a new canine coronavirus in a child who was hospitalized with pneumonia in 2018. If confirmed to be a human pathogen, it’d only be the world’s 8th coronavirus, and the first canine coronavirus, known to cause disease in humans.
nytimes.com/2021/05/20/hea…

2) It is not yet clear whether this specific virus poses a serious threat to humans, the researchers stress. The study does not prove that the pneumonia was caused by the virus, which may not be capable of spreading between people.

3) But the finding, which was published on Thursday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, highlights the need to more proactively search for viruses that could jump from animals into humans, the scientists said.

4) “I think the key message here is that these things are probably happening all over the world, where people come in contact with animals, especially intense contact, and we’re not picking them up,” said Dr. Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at Duke University & a study author.

5) “We should be looking for these things. If we can catch them early and find out that these viruses are successful in the human host, then we can mitigate them before they become a pandemic virus.”

6) Seven coronaviruses are currently known to infect humans. In addition to SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes Covid-19, there are coronaviruses that cause SARS, MERS and the common cold.

7) Many of these viruses are believed to have originated in bats, but can jump from bats to humans, either directly or after a stopover in another animal host.

…until now there has been no evidence that canine coronaviruses can infect people.

8) Scientists still cannot be certain whether it was a dog that transmitted the new virus to the patient; it likely was a dog, Dr. Gray said, but another, intermediate animal host, including a cat, may have been responsible.

9) (There is also no evidence that dogs transmit SARS-CoV-2 to humans, although both cats and dogs can catch it.) nytimes.com/2020/09/29/sci…

10) In eight of the specimens, they detected what seemed like a novel coronavirus, similar to those known to infect dogs. These specimens were primarily from children who lived in settings or areas in which contact with domestic and wild animals was common.

11) At first, Dr. Gray said, he and his colleagues thought that they had made a mistake. “If we examine 300 patients and eight of them show a canine coronavirus that had never been seen before, you go, ‘This must be a contaminant, this must be — this can’t be true,’” he said.

12) she confirmed that two of the eight samples did appear to contain a novel canine coronavirus. Moreover, one of those samples proved capable of causing damage to canine cells, she found.
Then she assembled the complete genome of the virus from this sample.

13) Its genome closely matched that of other known canine coronaviruses. “It is highly similar to a number of previously characterized canine coronaviruses, but it’s a novel strain,” Dr. Vlasova said.

14) The virus seemed to be a combination of two previously identified canine coronaviruses, and also contained fragments of both a cat coronavirus and a pig coronavirus.