As we move into the hot summer months in the northern hemisphere, it raises a question worth considering: can mosquitoes transmit one person's novel coronavirus to another?
Elizabeth McGraw, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and professor at Penn State University, explains the possibility of COVID-19 being carried by mosquitoes in a newly uploaded video.
In this short video, McGraw says scientists don't want the new coronavirus to spread among people through mosquito bites.
Both the US CDC and WHO have said that the virus does not appear to be a risk of being carried by mosquitoes, and they have good reason to believe this is the case.
"We know this is a respiratory tract infection and it's really transmitted most commonly by large droplets that are expelled from the respiratory tract," McGraw explains. "We also know that when SARS and MERS were a problem, mosquitos did not appear to be involved with transmission of those closely related coronaviruses either."
It is well known that mosquitoes can transmit many deadly diseases, including malaria.
In areas where these diseases are rampant, they can wreak havoc, and the health care system is not equipped to handle the large number of cases.
However, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is primarily an airborne disease, and scientists don't believe it can be carried from one person to another by mosquitoes.
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