I have split the discussion about Why is mortality from Covid-19 higher in Italy? as I think it deserves its own thread.
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Interactive map of phylogency of Covid 19.
It also matters how many strains entered a country, and how early. Just click on country of choice and see the direction of the particular strain and then see the outflow.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov?d=tree&p=full&r=country
Am I reading this correctly?
Did one of the strains go from Belgium and then to Italy (bottom of chart)? Did another go to Italy from the UK?
Great news!A new study by Johns Hopkins researchers and explained in The Economist suggests that Covid-19 may have spread much faster than thought because:
1) the percentage of asymptomatic people is higher than originally expected
2) the number of people reporting flu-like symptoms outside the flu season was much higher than official Covid-19 cases suggest
They conclude that it's good news as the fatality rate would then be 0.1%, similar to that of flu.
According to the French news website Futura-Sciences, 83% of Coronavirus patients in need of resuscitation in France are overweight or obese. The Guardian already announced 2 weeks ago that in the UK 70% of Corona patients in ICU were overweight or obese. So it would seem that excess weight is a major risk factor - possibly the most aggravating factor along with old age.
See:
The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women review – bold study of chromosomal advantage
"Sharon Moalem offers an intriguing theory on how two X chromosomes give women the edge in everything from colour vision to coronavirus"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...en-review-bold-study-of-chromosomal-advantage
Angela, I believe most of men would - and should - agree that it's indeed the better half.Did we need a study?
Just kidding.
Yes, it's been shown to be a factor for a lot of diseases.
What people need to keep in mind is that for women, one of the X chromosomes comes from her father's mother, so she's getting alleles from the whole spectrum of her ancestry even on the X chromosomes.
Also interesting from some recent studies is that there's some transference from the X as well.
All of it makes tracing the "source" of the "good" alleles very challenging.
Angela, I believe most of men would - and should - agree that it's indeed the better half.
I just didn't undestand the part in bold. Could you explain it, in short?
Thanks. Got what you meant now. You were referring mainly to the limited recombination between Y and X, or more specifically between their pseudoautosomal regions (which have genes, btw).I'm not at all sure about better, but stronger in terms of health, more long lived, as an average, yes.
I don't know if the science on this has changed, but these are notes I made for myself a good while ago as to what goes on during the production of the egg and the sperm. I'm sure you know most if not all of it, but here it goes...
The female body doesn't just pick one of its two X chromosomes to go into the egg. A unique X chromosome is made because the two X chromosomes swap some DNA or recombine. Damaged genes on the X are fixed in this way.
If this is still correct, the y chromosome also goes through a sort of recombination. It can do that because within itself it contains a second copy of its most important genes, and it can use these, which are a palindrome set, to try to correct any errors. In addition, there were papers which found that about 5% of the y matches pretty well with the X and recombine at those sites, also trying to repair errors.
However, none of this is as good at getting rid of errors as having two whole X chromosomes for recombination.
The way this was explained in the things that I read is that the lack of another whole chromosome with which to recombine when making sperm is the reason why the y has shrunk in size over time.
Anyway, that's the way I understood it.
When I first got interested in this discipline, one of the most difficult things for me was grasping how many female ancestors could be in my X chromosomes, not only from my mother's side, but from my father's side.
To track inheritance through the X would be a mind boggling task.
X chromosome inheritance for a female:
X chromosome inheritance for a male:
See:
Alarmed as COVID patients' blood thickened, New York doctors try new treatments
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-blood-idUSKCN22421Z
The relationship between nicotine and ACE2 has been explored in the framework of cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases [9]. Accordingly, in the ACE/ANG II/AT1R arm, nicotine increases the expression and/or activity of renin, ACE and AT1R, whereas in the compensatory ACE2/ANG-(1–7)/MasR arm, nicotine down regulates the expression and/or activity of ACE2 and AT2R, thus suggesting a possible contribution of acetylcholine receptors in ACE2 regulation. This possibility has not yet been explored in the framework of viral neuroinfections.
In conclusion, we propose, and try to justify, the hypothesis that nAChRs play a critical role in the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 infection and as a consequence propose nicotine and nicotinic orthosteric and/or allosteric agents as a possible therapy for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Interestingly, ivermectin, which has been recently shown to inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cells in vitro [53], is a positive allosteric modulator of a7 nAChR [54]. The nicotinic hypothesis might be further challenged by additional clinical studies and by experimental observations determining whether SARS-CoV-2 physically interacts with the nAChR in vitro, for instance by electrophysiological recordings, high resolution EM and by animal model studies. Further work should also specify the still enigmatic relationships between ACE2 and nAChRs in the nervous system.
https://www.qeios.com/read/article/571
SARS-CoV-2 is thought to use ACE2 (rs4646127) as a cell receptor for viral entry. The French paper proposes that nicotine down regulates the activity of ACE2 in lung tissues, which means that cell receptors used by the coronavirus are clogged or covered by nicotine, thus preventing it from infecting the lung.
See:
"
No case of a child passing coronavirus to an adult exists, evidence review shows
There has not been a single instance of a child under 10 transmitting the virus, even in contact tracing carried out by WHO
"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...ing-coronavirus-adult-exists-evidence-review/
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