While the earliest reports suggested that the virus’ mode of transmission was from animals to humans, human-to-human transmission has now been confirmed by official reports.
According to the World Health Organization, previous outbreaks due to other coronavirus strains also involved human-to-human transmission. This occurred either through respiratory droplets, physical contact with infected individuals and formites (infected objects). However, a new report suggests that there’s another way COVID-19 can spread: via infected feces.
“This virus has many routes of transmission, which can partially explain its strong transmission and fast transmission speed,” wrote the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in a report published online last February 15.
Recently, the China CDC reported the isolation of a 2019-nCoV strain from a stool specimen submitted by a COVID-19 (the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2) patient. This was done in the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Laboratory of the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention in China.
The COVID-19 patient experienced the onset of severe pneumonia on January 16, and the stool sample was taken 15 days after the onset. After isolating the virus, the researchers used Vero cells — considered the most suitable system for primary isolation and cultivation of viruses — to culture the strain and grow virus stocks for sequence analysis. The full-length genomic sequence of the isolated strain showed a 99.98 percent similarity to that of the first isolated novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from Wuhan. The report further stated that the viral particles in the Vero cells had a similar morphology to coronaviruses.
These findings confirm that the stools of COVID-19 patients contain live viruses, which opens the possibility of disease transmission via the fecal-oral route. The China CDC warns that infected stool samples can contaminate hands, food, water and other commonly handled objects, and that contact with any of these, once contaminated, can lead to infection...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...