A New #Coronavirus May Be Making People Sick. And It’s Coming From Dogs : Goats and Soda : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/05/20/996515792/a-newly-identified-coronavirus-is-making-people-sick-and-it-s-coming-from-dogs
Zhang has studied coronaviruses for more than 30 years. He thinks it’s too early to call this new virus a human pathogen. “As the authors are careful to say in their paper, they have not proven what’s called Koch’s postulates,” he says. That is, Vlasova, Gray and colleagues haven’t shown that the new coronavirus causes pneumonia; so far, it has only been associated with the disease.
“To do that, strictly, they need to inject the virus into humans and see if it reproduces the disease,” he says. “Of course [for ethical reasons], we cannot do that.”
Instead, Zhang says, they can look to see how common the virus is in pneumonia patients around the world — and they can test to see whether it makes mice or another animal sick.