Eyeless on Campus: COVID-19-- New Orleans Outbreak--STRAIN VARIANT VS TEST KIT CAPABILITY

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"...if the virus in The Big Easy is minutely different than in The Big Apple..."

(CMD/COC)--Following today's briefing from the White House, ABCs George Stephanopoulos was briefed by Rebecca Jarvis who mentioned that hospital admissions appeared to be dropping in New York City and suggested that it might be due to capacity. In the meantime, the next front may open in the south, with New Orleans showing the latest trend for exponential growth.

Again, the graph at the governor's office appears similar to that of New York City but with some minor age adjustments. Note, for instance, the rather even distribution across the board for cases confirmed (in yellow). Casualties, as in the NYC stats, show the elderly with the highest rate of attrition (in red) but again, there may also be the "underlying illness" coefficient at work where contributing factors include diabetes, asthma, lung and heart disease, to name a few. Thus, it is premature to attribute all the deaths to the COVID-19 virus alone and would have to be at the discretion of the medical officer to make the call.

One of the deviations from the NYC stats is with reference to gender, where male-female casualty ratio is nearly two to one. In Louisiana, however, the stats clearly show just the opposite, where female over male death rate shows about 60 over 40 percent. Whether this represents a different strain of the virus or not might be a hint of just how accurate the testing method is in determination the makeup of the virus and whether it is a variant or mutation. That is also indicated by the confirmed case distribution from the graph above.
The actual test kit capability to detect separate strains if the virus in The Big Easy is minutely different than The Big Apple may come into question when more data is available, which, unfortunately, means more confirmed infections and casualties.
The process of detecting a mutating strain of the virus is not as straightforward as expected, as noted by Julianna Lemieux, PhD, in her Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News article from January;
"Hong Li, PhD, department head of reagent services, R&D department, at GenScript—a company with headquarters in both China and the United States—told GEN that their kit tests for the presence of four multiple nCoV-2019 genes: the O, R, N, and E gene. Typical of RNA viruses, coronaviruses mutate frequently. Detecting multiple genes simultaneously reduces the risk of missing detection that could occur with genomic variation. In addition, Li noted that they can detect the virus at a very early stage." (GenEng)
Whether the test kits currently being used in New Orleans are the same as those used in New York might explain the different results in age-gender confirmed cases, even if the death rates among the elderly appear to be in agreement.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020

COVID-19-- New Orleans Outbreak--STRAIN VARIANT VS TEST KIT CAPABILITY

Louisiana coronavirus cases spike by 407; number, rate of hospitalized patients also up