My Virtual Reading Room

From Medscape:

COVID Testing FAQ, From Reinfection to Persistent Positives

 Does a positive COVID-19 PCR test result indicate that the individual is infectious?

Because the COVID-19 PCR tests only detect a fragment of the viral RNA, a positive test does not mean that infectious virus is present. In one small study of people who had mild or asymptomatic novel coronavirus infection, virus was not cultured from the upper airway after day 10 of illness, but detection of viral carriage by the molecular assay has been seen more than 80 days after the initial infection.

COVID-19 Vaccine: Latest Updates

(June 10, 2020 — With more than 160 potential vaccines for COVID-19 under study, optimistic experts hope that a viable vaccine may be ready by the end of 2020.

Other experts caution that the timeline may be unrealistic. Only a small number of those vaccine candidates are being tested on people, and chances are many of the other projects won't survive beyond the laboratory stage.

Even so, vaccine experts point out that funding has been plentiful, many different approaches are under study, and collaborations between small firms developing the vaccines and large drug companies with the capacity to mass produce them all give reason for hope.

Dexamethasone Hailed as 'Breakthrough' in COVID-19 Trial, Reduced Deaths

(very interesting how clinical research has gone back and forth about the use of steroids...)

( Two more articles: )

People probably caught coronavirus from minks. That’s a wake-up call to study infections in animals, researchers say, from The Washington Post

A very good article; here's a brief excerpt:

...The steps being taken in the Netherlands, which also include surveillance of cats at the farms and wild mink relatives called martens, are among the broadest efforts to understand how a zoonotic virus that originated in animals before hopping to humans may now be spreading back to animals. In the six months since the outbreak began, cases have been reported of human transmission to dogs, cats, tigers and lions in addition to minks. Laboratory experiments have found that ferrets, hamsters, monkeys and other mammals are also susceptible to the virus.