A new transmission route for the propagation of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus

Antoine Danchin; Tuen Wai Patrick Ng; Gabriel TURINICI

A secondary propagation route Due to the versatility of the virus, in addition to interfering with the immune response, contagion may involve a variety of causes, such as environments contaminated with virus carrier secretions, dirty water effluents, besides the expected direct contamination via aerosols. This makes that the oro-fecal route should be considered as an important complement of contact with the virus (recent information sustains this hypothesis 11 ).This was observed at the Amoy Gardens cluster of cases for SARS 12, 13 . This observation prompted us to include in our model, besides the major respiratory route, a secondary propagation route, which is not a direct human-to-human propagation but rather some indirect vector (or environment element) to/from human. A second important consequence of assuming the presence of an indirect route is that the selection pressure on virus mutants will differ considerably between lung tropism and gut tropism. Finally, there may be a difference in incubation time, the -gut tropism‖ version of the virus would possibly cause less fever 14 . This hypothesis is consistent with some propagation patterns, e.g. the first case in Macau, which was not detected at the border, implying that that the affected person did not have fever. We should note that this makes the disease considerably more dangerous in terms of propagation because carriers are, at least for some time "invisible" and display a risky behavior 15, 16 .