The study was published June 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The 30 study participants, who previously had tested positive for COVID-19, collected their own samples at a drive-through testing site after watching a short video animation and reading a one-page document instructing them how to perform the swab. The nasal swab for the study is more comfortable to use than the long nasopharyngeal swab currently used to collect samples from the back of the nasal cavity.

Allowing people who suspect they may have COVID-19 to collect their own sample has many advantages. Sample-collection kits could be widely distributed, allowing more people to be tested. Those using the kit wouldn’t have to travel to a testing site, negating the risk of transmission to health care workers and others with whom they interact in transit. Self-collection would also conserve supplies of personal protective equipment used by health care workers.

“There is an urgent need to increase our testing capacity to slow the overall spread of the virus,” said Yvonne Maldonado, MD, professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of health research and policy. “A sample collection procedure that can safely and easily be performed by the patient in their own car or at home could reduce the exposure of health care workers and also allow many more people to submit samples for testing.”

Maldonado is the senior author of the study, which was conducted in collaboration with Andra L. Blomkalns, MD, the Redlich Family Professor and professor and chair of emergency medicine, and Prasanthi Govindarajan, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine; senior research data analyst Jonathan Altamirano is the lead author.

Providing nasal swab instructions

The study participants had tested positive in March at Stanford Health Care for the virus that causes COVID-19. Maldonado and her team contacted each of them by phone at home and provided them with written instructions and a short video about how to collect a nasal swab.

They were asked to return to Stanford Health Care for drive-through testing. At that visit, they collected their own specimen by applying a nasal swab to both nostrils. Then, a physician collected two additional samples using a nasal swab and a swab applied to the back of the throat and the tonsils. All three samples were tested for the presence of the virus at the Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory.

Of the 30 participants, 29 received identical results — either positive or negative for the presence of the virus — for the three samples. Eleven of the participants were positive, and 18 were negative. One person’s self-collected swab at the drive-through site revealed the presence of the virus, whereas the two swabs collected by the physician tested negative.

The researchers were also interested in learning how long an infected person would test positive for the virus after they first experienced symptoms.

Twenty-three participants reported that they first experienced symptoms between four and 37 days prior to returning for the drive-through test. (The timing of symptom onset was unavailable for seven of the participants.) Of the 12 people who returned within two weeks after symptoms began, seven tested positive; of the 11 people who returned for testing more than two weeks after symptom onset, only two tested positive.

“It is critical for us to understand how long an infected person may remain infectious and what the pattern of transmission might be within their household,” Maldonado said. “This information would help public health workers craft guidelines as to how long a person with COVID-19 should remain quarantined and when it is likely to be safe to interact again with family members and co-workers. Understanding the timeline of viral shedding will be particularly important for previously infected health care workers who are needed to care for other COVID-19 patients.”

Other Stanford co-authors of the study are pediatric fellow Lauren Kushner, MD; pathology fellow Bryan Stevens, MD; and Benjamin Pinsky, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and of medicine.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Stanford Medicine. Original written by Krista Conger. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Millions of these grazing animals — easily recognizable by their oversized snouts — once migrated across what is today Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Georgia and more.

But then, over the span of three weeks in 2015, nearly 200,000, or two-thirds of their existing population, sickened and died from a bacterial infection. Today, the a little more than 100,000 saiga are hanging onto survival in a few pockets of Eurasia.

The decline, and uncertain fate, of the saiga is a story that resonates with Joanna Lambert. She’s a conservation biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a coauthor of a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. The study explores the current state of ungulates, or hoofed animals like the saiga, in the western U.S. and around the world.

Lambert, who has studied ecological communities in both North America and Equatorial Africa, explained that many of these creatures aren’t well-known outside of their home regions. But when these animals disappear, entire ecosystems can reshuffle, occasionally beyond recognition.

“We’re losing these animals without people ever knowing they were there in the first place,” said Lambert, a professor in the Program of Environmental Studies at CU Boulder.

For the researcher, the study’s publication marks an opportunity to reflect on how she stays hopeful even amid tremendous losses — and how to talk about the natural world during a period of unprecedented social upheaval.

“I tell my students, ‘I have to give you the facts. This is the world you’re growing up in, but don’t let that paralyze you,'” Lambert said.

Unsung species

The new research was led by Joel Berger of Colorado State University and also included scientists from Bhutan, Argentina and Chile.

The team decided to look at ungulates because — with a few exceptions like rhinos and elephants — they don’t usually pop up in brochures for conservation organizations. But, Lambart said, they’re still in trouble: Huemel, for example, once roamed across the Patagonia region of South America. Today, a little more than 1,000 of these fluffy deer still live in the wild. The tamaraw, a pint-sized buffalo from the Philippines, is down to just a few hundred individuals.

“The whole world knows the stories of pandas and mountain gorillas, but there are untold numbers of unsung species that come and go without the world’s attention,” she said.

Their cases also show just how complicated conservation can be.

Lambert has spent years trekking the grasslands and forests of Yellowstone National Park to study wildlife. After federal officials killed all the park’s wolves in the 1940s, elk herds there began to multiply — big time. Head counts for these herbivores surged from a few thousand individuals to tens of thousands, and they devoured once-abundant plants like cottonwood and willow trees.

“When you pull one species out of its community, or if you add a new one in, the entire assembly changes,” Lambert said. “That has been the history of what humans have done on the planet.”

When the park brought wolves back in the 1990s, and elk numbers dropped back down, something unexpected happened: beavers, which had also disappeared from Yellowstone, began reappearing, too. The furry swimmers, it turns out, depend on those same tree species to build their dams.

“In many cases, we don’t know what rules these ecosystems followed in the past,” she said. “Even when we do know, it doesn’t matter because we now have this added element of human tinkering.”

Ecological grief

Lambert has also struggled to keep going as a conservation biologist as the wilds around her field sites in Africa and North America dwindled, then vanished entirely.

“As I returned each year from the field, it was taking me longer and longer to recover from a sort of existential depression,” she said. “I realized that I have been profoundly impacted by the losses I’ve seen.”

Many of Lambert’s students feel similarly hopeless, a phenomenon that psychologists call “ecological grief.” She tells them to focus on the success stories, however rare they are. Protected areas like Yellowstone have saved countless animals from extinction and have given others like wolves new chances at survival. Lambert is also providing scientific guidance around proposals to return wolves to Colorado.

And there are still a lot of animals out there — including the few remaining herds of big-nosed saiga.

“We need to fight like hell to keep all that,” she said.

The findings, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that asymptomatic infections may account for as much as 45 percent of all COVID-19 cases, playing a significant role in the early and ongoing spread of COVID-19. The report highlights the need for expansive testing and contact tracing to mitigate the pandemic.

“The silent spread of the virus makes it all the more challenging to control,” says Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and professor of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research. “Our review really highlights the importance of testing. It’s clear that with such a high asymptomatic rate, we need to cast a very wide net, otherwise the virus will continue to evade us.”

Together with behavioral scientist Daniel Oran, Topol collected information from testing studies on 16 diverse cohorts from around the world. These datasets — gathered via keyword searches of PubMed, bioRxiv and medRxiv, as well as Google searches of relevant news reports — included data on nursing home residents, cruise ship passengers, prison inmates and various other groups.

“What virtually all of them had in common was that a very large proportion of infected individuals had no symptoms,” says Oran. “Among more than 3,000 prison inmates in four states who tested positive for the coronavirus, the figure was astronomical: 96 percent asymptomatic.”

The review further suggests that asymptomatic individuals are able to transmit the virus for an extended period of time, perhaps longer than 14 days. The viral loads are very similar in people with or without symptoms, but it remains unclear whether their infectiousness is of the same magnitude. To resolve that issue, we’ll need large-scale studies that include sufficient numbers of asymptomatic people.

The authors also conclude that the absence of symptoms may not imply an absence of harm. CT scans conducted on 54 percent of 76 asymptomatic individuals on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, appear to show significant subclinical lung abnormalities raising the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection impacting lung function that might not be immediately apparent. The scientists say further research is needed to confirm the potential significance of this finding.

The authors also acknowledge that the lack of longitudinal data makes distinguishing between asymptomatic and presymptomatic individuals difficult. An asymptomatic individual is someone who is infected with SARS-CoV-2, but never develops symptoms of COVID-19, while a presymptomatic person is similarly infected, but will eventually develop symptoms. Longitudinal testing, which refers to repeated testing of individuals over time, would help differentiate between the two.

“Our estimate of 40 to 45 percent asymptomatic means that, if you’re unlucky enough to get infected, the probability is almost a flip of a coin on whether you’re going to have symptoms. So to protect others, we think that wearing a mask makes a lot of sense,” Oran concludes.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Scripps Research Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, compared four recent global maps of the conversion of natural lands to anthropogenic land uses to reach its conclusions. The more impacted half of Earth’s lands includes cities, croplands, and places intensively ranched or mined.

“The encouraging takeaway from this study is that if we act quickly and decisively, there is a slim window in which we can still conserve roughly half of Earth’s land in a relatively intact state,” said lead author Jason Riggio, a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology.

The study, published June 5 on World Environment Day, aims to inform the upcoming global Convention on Biological Diversity — the Conference of Parties 15. The historic meeting was scheduled to occur in China this fall but was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Among the meeting’s goals is to establish specific, and higher, targets for land and water protection.

Approximately 15 percent of the Earth’s land surface and 10 percent of the oceans are currently protected in some form. However, led by organizations including Nature Needs Half and the Half-Earth Project, there have been bold global calls for governments to commit to protecting 30 percent of the land and water by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050.

Intact natural lands across the globe can help purify air and water, recycle nutrients, enhance soil fertility and retention, pollinate plants, and break down waste products. The value of maintaining these vital ecosystem services to the human economy has been placed in the trillions of U.S. dollars annually.

CONSERVATION AND COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic now shaking the globe illustrates the importance of maintaining natural lands to separate animal and human activity. The leading scientific evidence points to the likelihood that SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, is a zoonotic virus that jumped from animals to humans. Ebola, bird flu and SARS are other diseases known to have spilled over into the human population from nonhuman animals.

“Human risk to diseases like COVID-19 could be reduced by halting the trade and sale of wildlife, and minimizing human intrusion into wild areas,” said senior author Andrew Jacobson, professor of GIS and conservation at Catawba College in North Carolina.

Jacobson said that regional and national land-use planning that identify and appropriately zone locations best suited to urban growth and agriculture could help control the spread of human development. Establishing protections for other landscapes, particularly those currently experiencing low human impacts, would also be beneficial.

FROM THE TUNDRA TO THE DESERT

Among the largest low-impact areas are broad stretches of boreal forests and tundra across northern Asia and North America and vast deserts like the Sahara in Africa and the Australian Outback. These areas tend to be colder and/or drier and less fit for agriculture.

“Though human land uses are increasingly threatening Earth’s remaining natural habitats, especially in warmer and more hospitable areas, nearly half of Earth still remains in areas without large-scale intensive use,” said co-author Erle Ellis, professor of geography at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

Areas having low human influence do not necessarily exclude people, livestock or sustainable management of resources. A balanced conservation response that addresses land sovereignty and weighs agriculture, settlement or other resource needs with the protection of ecosystem services and biodiversity is essential, the authors note.

“Achieving this balance will be necessary if we hope to meet ambitious conservation targets,” said Riggio. “But our study optimistically shows that these targets are still within reach.”