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Novel coronavirus losing potency, says US expert

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News Stories Posted by ARY News Digital Team

Dr Donald Yealy of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center on Friday claimed that the novel coronavirus is now losing potency.

Addressing a press conference on Thursday, UPMC chair of emergency medicine Dr Donald Yealy said that people seem to be contracting COVID-19 less easily and its cases appear to be appear to be less severe then when the pandemic first took hold in the US.

‘The virus may be changing,’ he said and added, ‘Some patterns suggest the potency is diminished.’

He noted that UPMC has successfully treated more than 500 coronavirus patients since March, and in recent weeks fewer patients are requiring ventilators to help them breathe.

The doctor said that less than four percent of all tests and only 0.2 percent of tests in asymptomatic patients are coming back positive which indicate that the virus is less prevalent in the communities UPMC serves.

The doctors’ findings that the virus could be declining in potency came days after a researcher in Italy announced that patients there were showing much smaller amounts of the virus in their system, compared to samples taken during the peak of the crisis in March and April.

Professor Alberto Zangrillo, head of intensive care at Italy’s San Raffaele Hospital in Lombardy, went so far as to say that the virus ‘clinically no longer exists’ during a Sunday interview on state television.

But World Health Organization experts and a range of other scientists quickly rejected Zangrillo’s claims on Monday, saying there is no evidence to support the assertion that the coronavirus has been losing potency.

WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said, ‘In terms of transmissibility, that has not changed, in terms of severity, that has not changed.’

Zangrillo, well known in Italy as the personal doctor of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said his comments were backed up by a study conducted by a fellow scientist, Massimo Clementi, which he said would be published soon.

“We have never said that the virus has changed, we said that the interaction between the virus and the host has definitely changed,” Zangrillo had said.

He maintained that this could be due either to different characteristics of the virus, which he said they had not yet identified, or different characteristics in those infected.

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