Covid causes significant neuron damage in Rhesus Macaques | Hacker News Reader

Covid causes significant neuron damage in Rhesus Macaques

ucdavis.edu

29 pointsgeox9 comments

Loathe to think China’s zero covid policy will prove to be best after all

China's real-time maiming of its own economy can hardly be classified a "win" in any sense, especially given COVID is endemic and will always force justification of a dynamic zero policy by the party so long as the party continues to save face (which will be forever because single party authoritarian regimes cannot abide humiliation).

So few Chinese have COVID antibodies that this will remain a powderkeg able to go off at any moment. The economic harm is already done and flight of the bread and butter Made in China industry is rapidly accelerating. There's no unwinding it now.

Lock yourself up until the flu goes extinct or you're an asshole.

nah it hasn't been and will likely never be, this study doesn't even quantify the damage even suggesting that it's only important for people already vulnerable to alzheimers

I am curious how we are going about studying these in Macaques. Are we trying to deliberately get them the virus and see how their brain respond? If so, haven’t we learned enough on how virus jumps species and can wreck havoc?

The idea is that the monkeys are being used as a 'model organism' for how humans react to getting the virus. Since it is not possible (typically) to extract brain tissue from living humans during Covid infection and see how it's affecting their brain. So macaques are used as a stand-in.

I believe the macaques are just infected with the same Covid strain that can infect humans.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that covid has already made its way to humans, and doesn't need to jump from monkeys.

Doesn't that assume that it had already jumped to monkeys from humans, or from bat to monkey to human?

I have no idea how the process works, and if it easier for a disease to jump from primate to human or vice-versa than it is from other species.

The original comment was that there is no risk of Covid in Macaques jumping to humans since Covid is already in the human population.

In general it is probably easier for a virus to jump between closely related species that it is to jump between more divergent species. Humans and macaques only split about 20-30 million years ago. Humans and bat probably split 70 million years ago. It doesn’t mean that bat viruses can’t make the jump, many do, just that it might be harder for them to establish themselves in humans. Bats live in very tight quarters and end up exchanging a lot of virus between each other. This is a great breeding ground for viruses so there are probably more virus types in bats than in many other animals. That gives a large pool of viruses which have the potential to infect humans.

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