Science Is Art: Coronavirus up close

image courtesy of National Institutes of Health NIAID

A large group of clinical and basic scientists at Upstate is engaged in several activities related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

These include efforts to:

• Improve testing related to negative or inconclusive results.

• Precisely quantify the viral levels in patients as their disease progresses.

• Improve the care and therapies for COVID-19 patients.

• Determine factors that influence resistance to the disease or recovery.

• Identify social, biological and ecological factors that affect the rates of the disease in Central New York.

This summer, a lab at Upstate will become operational that will allow additional research to be safely conducted on COVID-19.

This image of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was produced in February on an electron microscope at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, using a sample from a patient in the United States. Spikes on the surface of coronaviruses give the virus family its name. Corona is Latin for “crown.”

This article is from the spring 2020 Upstate Health magazine, a special edition dealing with the coronavirus.