To raise hand, click “Participants” at the bottom and then you should see “Raise Hand” in the panel at the right.

Hi to everyone - just enjoying a nice sunset in Zurich…

Glad you could join us!

not seeing slides

nevermind I see it

I have been doing interviews from an EvMed perspective for Roland Martin Online. Roland Martin is a former CNN correspondent and his show is primarily viewed by persons of African descent.

BTW, early in March on that show I predicted that we would see glaring disparities in incidence and death in African American and underserved minorities.

One of the major contributions our community can do - according to my personal view - is to challenge not-evidence based medical concepts , sort of “out-of-the-box-thinking”

Trevor Bedford once mentioned 12 mutations. How is their data compared to yours?

With those numbers are you separating NSyn and Syn mutations? So is 20 total mutations or 20 Nsyn mutations?

People ask about flu evolution and coronavirus evolution: will we expect coronavirus to come around every year, will we have an annual vaccine? if not, why is coronavirus different? A lot of public concern about viral evolution - and a good opportunity to prove the necessity of evo bio for understanding this!

Do you think that some of the global measures ( like quarantine, slowing down the spread etc) eventually have a functional mutational impact?

One Health perspectives are relevant to understanding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. How do you feel about One Health’s relation to evolutionary medicine, and how core concepts in ev med can contribute to One Health approaches?

After years of reading fancy models of virulence evolution, it has been disappointing to see that they seem to be weak now that we really need them. Can they be useful? Can the current epidemic help assess them?

Following up on Frank’s message…Can we predict how social distancing will influence virulence?

“Physical distancing” , not “social distancing”… ;)

Concerning Randy’s question we would really need good data on the number of people that are infected and asymptomatic. The NIH antibody may help in this regard, but I also think it is under powered with collecting only 10,000 samples.

Agreed that vaccine will require affinity to parts of the virus that are evolving slowly.

Would you please discuss the phylogenetic relationship of CoV-2 with the avid virus associated with the so-called ‘Spanish’ flu; and why Spain is possibly not the true source of that 1919 pandemic?

With healthcare workers in large cities getting exposed to patients infected from different sources, can we expect to see recombination of genetic material inside a person (a la HIV)? Also, is this clinically relevant? Hospitals as some sort of a marketplace of genetic diversity for the CoV?

Agree with Jay, biggest issue I have teaching my Ev Med class at my HBCU is the student’s fear of mathematical reasoning.

For Randy’s question on virulence: the models are good but data are harder to come by and will take some time. E.g. we need to know how replication rate influences both transmission probability and death rate (virulence), which tradeoff in the eqn for R0. I think only HIV has the data necessary to test the tradeoff model, and supports it… at least for human disease. Anyone know of other solid tests of tradeoff model for a human ID?

To Charlie’s point for COVID another aspect of its tradeoff relations will be persistence on environmental surfaces - not an issue for HIV.

are any of the sequences linked with clinical information?

To Michael’s point we absolutely need to link clinical death/illness to specific genetic variants.

Re. the virulence/transmissibility trade-off: maybe some research was done on some herpesvirus and squirrel/spider monkeys. (Not a virologist) Will see if I can find the papers.

How is it that an old TB vaccine confers some benefits during this Covid-19 pandemic? I’m thinking that might be interesting…

I read that part of the clinical description in China included diarrhea. I haven’t heard this recently. last weeks speakers mentioned the enteric nature of coronaviruses in bats. could ancestral strains have shifted away from a fecal-oral transmission?

lots of prior research at NCSU on poultry coronaviruses

A lot of papers are now suspecting antibody-dependent enhancement influencing the severity of symptoms (a second hit with a different strain causing more harm). Maybe the genomic association studies for symptoms might not yield a lot of meaningful info…

In addtion to BCG vaccination, influenz vaccination seems to have benefit by increasing the innate immunological response and that intradermal vaccination route may augment this even more.

Concerning diarrhea in China, there are genetic differences between East Asians, Europeans, and Africans; as well as differences in intestinal microbiomes, so it would be hard to tell if the differences in symptoms result from changes in the virus or changes in who it is infecting.

Saw another preprint today that links MMR vaccine. Shoddier then the BCG studies IMO.

One of the medicines that has shown some efficacy against Covid-19, when used with other medications, in reducing symptoms, duration and morbidity has been a Cuban developed interferon alpha2B. They have used this in Cuba for some time against HIV, meningitis, MERS, prior SARS outbreaks. China has made millions of doses and distributed them. Efforts are underway to get the clinical trial results from Cuba, China and now Italy. A national campaign is underway across the US to get FDA and OFAC approval for import---breaking the blockade against Cuba. Can you explain, to this HS physio-anatomy teacher, how interferon works ...or perhaps someone else on the call can.

very interesting Vaughn! great job and good to see you!

Thanks everyone. I’m at vaughn dot cooper at pitt dot edu

re: education, please visit evolvingstem dot org

Thank you Vaughn and TriCEM! :)

Thank you Vaughn!

Thank you.