Daniel Griffin provides a clinical report on COVID-19, Slovlakia’s plan to test all adults for SARS-CoV-2 infection, viral variants arising in Danish mink and their potential threat to humans, why it is unethical to carry out challenge trials, Nipah virus dynamics in bats and spillovers into humans, and direct cardiac damage by spike-mediated cardiomyocyte fusion.

Nels joins TWiV to reveal the discovery of a picornavirus of zebrafish by measuring immune responses in the host, genome sequence analysis of the White House COVID-19 outbreak, and a six-fold higher SARS-CoV-2 exposure rate than reported cases in German children.

Daniel Griffin provides a clinical report on COVID-19, then we discuss rapid deployment of SARS-CoV-2 testing by research laboratories in San Francisco, longitudinal observation of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in patients, and listener questions on vaccines, loss of smell, face masks, and more.

In this episode we explain how regions of the human genome associated with severe COVID-19 are identified, the finding that one of these regions was inherited from Neanderthals, and prolonged SARS-CoV-2 reproduction in an immunocompromised patient.

Daniel Griffin provides a clinical report on COVID-19, then we discuss Bill Foege’s letter to CDC director Robert Redfield, the false promise of herd immunity for COVID-19, secret blueprints for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine trials released, and neuropilin-1 as a possible entry protein for the virus.

Daniel Griffin provides a clinical report on COVID-19, we debunk the Great Barrington Declaration, and discuss smell and taste changes as early indicators of the pandemic, vascular disease and thrombosis in SARS-CoV-2 infected humans and rhesus macaques, and the ability of the swine pathogen SADS-CoV to infect human respiratory tract cells.