Il professore Arnaldo Caruso, president of the Italian Society of Virology (Siv-lsv) because of a scientific discovery said: "Yes, the new Coronavirus is losing strength. "
In the Microbiology laboratory of the Asi Spedali Civili in Brescia, directed by him, a variant of Sars-CoV-2 virus was isolated less powerful, more good. Specify Professor Caruso: "While the viral strains that we have been used to seeing in recent months, which we have isolated and sequenced, are biological bombs capable of exterminating target cells in 2-3 days, this requires at least 6 days to start attacking, twice the time.".
The news specifies the National Daily will be the subject of scientific publication, but the scholar wants to anticipate the news to send a message of hope.
These more attenuated viral variants are the future of Covid-19's probable evolution, the virologist highlights with a note of enthusiasm.
"It is so true that he is losing strength - underlines Caruso, that every day we see positive nasopharyngeal swabs no longer strongly, but weakly ".
This is the molecular proof of very light, almost inapparent infections. The professor points out that the virus is seen in very, very small doses. It has happened, however, that while lately all tampons with low viral load arrive one with a very high charge happened and it surprised us. An even bigger surprise considering that this subject was asymptomatic.
We therefore went to isolate the virus, discovering that in culture it was extremely weaker than the previous ones. That is, by putting him in contact with good cells to attack in vitro, he could not even kill them all. Indeed, even just to start attacking them, it needed at least 6 days, against the 48-72 hours sufficient for the classic strains to finish all the cells available.
But Caruso warns: "We do not know if and how much this variant circulates, but we can say that something is happening".
This evolution was also announced by Hong Kong colleagues in the magazine 'Emerging Microbes & Infections'. This is a very well done study - Caruso highlights - in which they have documented the lower aggressiveness of these viruses in vitro and in vivo on animals. The authors noted that these variants have large genetic alterations and we, who are carrying out genetic testing, hope to see the same.
With the arrival of the summer season these viruses tend to disappear for reasons that we still do not know exactly, as well as we do not know why they leave in November-December, concludes Professor Caruso.