Coronavirus News | 28 Ancient Viruses Found
Coronavirus News - 28 Ancient Viruses Found
Knife-wielding thieves have stolen 600 toilet paper rolls from outside a Hong Kong supermarket amid shortages caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
Investigators caught two of the three men and recovered all of the toilet paper - worth about HK$1,700 (nearly £98) - stolen from the Mong Kok district on Monday morning.
Several hours later, police reportedly found the stolen rolls in a nearby guesthouse.
Footage shows police officers standing beside several crates of toilet rolls outside the supermarket, with one only half stacked.
Supplies of the commodity have become extremely scarce in Hong Kong and mainland China amid concerns the coronavirus will spread further.
Panic has emptied supermarket shelves, with people stockpiling everything from cleaning products to food supplies.
China’s central bank says it plans to destroy most of the banknotes collected by hospitals, markets, and buses in some regions hard hit by the new coronavirus. Fan Yifei, deputy governor of the Chinese central bank, said they plan to out pump 600 billion yuan ($85.6 billion) of freshly printed paper currency to replace the bills taken out of circulation. In other areas of the country, the government has ordered banks to remove incoming paper currency from circulation and replace it with the new cash. They have been directed to keep the cash under quarantine for 14 days and disinfect it at high temperatures and with ultraviolet light before returning it to the public.
In 2015, a team of scientists from the United States and China traveled to Tibet to gather samples of Earth's oldest glacial ice.
Earlier this month, they published a paper on the pre-print server bioRxiv detailing their discovery of 28 new virus groups in the 15,000-year-old ice - and warning that climate change could free the ancient viruses into the modern world.
The team drilled 50 meters (164 feet) down into the glacier to obtain two ice cores, which then underwent a three-step decontamination protocol.
After that, the researchers used microbiology techniques to identify microbes in the samples.
Those techniques revealed 33 virus groups - including, notably, 28 ancient viruses that scientists had never seen before.
"This study establishes ultra-clean microbial and viral sampling procedures for glacier ice, which complements prior in silico decontamination methods and expands, for the first time, the clean procedures to viruses," the team wrote.
As the team pointed out in their paper, climate change now threatens both our ability to exhaustively catalogue those tiny lifeforms - as well as our ability to stay safe from dangerous ones.
"At a minimum, [ice melt] could lead to the loss of microbial and viral archives that could be diagnostic and informative of past Earth climate regimes," they wrote.
"However, in a worst-case scenario, this ice melt could release pathogens into the environment."
The Japanese government has found a novel way to use technology as it works to combat the coronavirus outbreak, which has spread to its own backyard.
Off the coast of Japan, more than 3,500 passengers and crew members have been quarantined for more than a week aboard a Princess Cruises ship where at least 170 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed.
The two-week cruise was supposed to end 10 days ago, but since Japanese health officials found several cases of the virus when the boat pulled into port, everyone has been on lockdown on their new floating home. Passengers have gotten restless, tweeting mixed reviews of the room-service food and trying to alert local media about the lack of medicine on board.
"Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning we need to at least ask the question," Cotton said of the lab.
"This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market," he said.
https://news.sky.com/story/hon....g-kong-armed-thieves Hong Kong: Armed thieves steal 50 packs of toilet paper amid coronavirus shortage
https://www.thedailybeast.com/....china-to-destroy-pap China to Destroy Paper Currency From Hardest-Hit Coronavirus Regions
https://www.sciencealert.com/s....everal-ancient-virus Several Ancient Viruses Have Been Discovered in 15,000-Year-Old Glacial Ice
https://www.businessinsider.co....m/japanese-governmen The Japanese government gave 2,000 iPhones to passengers stuck on a cruise ship where nearly 200 coronavirus cases have been confirmed
https://www.businessinsider.co....m/coronavirus-biowea A GOP senator keeps pushing a thoroughly debunked theory that the Wuhan coronavirus is a leaked Chinese biological weapon gone wrong
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