The exposure of urban rodents to the human COVID-19 virus and the potential for viral recombination

我们所有人都受到COVID-19大流行的影响，这是由一种最初从动物（可能是蝙蝠）跳到人身上的病毒（技术上讲，SARS-CoV-2）引起的。现在病毒是直接在人与人之间传播，COVID-19是一种冠状病毒，冠状病毒在野生动物中非常常见。虽然每种冠状病毒通常感染一种动物，但冠状病毒也可以在动物物种之间传播。因此，一般的观点是，动物是病毒的“宿主”，有时会进入人类。由于有如此多的人感染了COVID-19，我们认为人类现在可能是感染动物的病毒宿主。如果这种情况真的发生，最有可能的地方有高密度的人和动物-如啮齿动物在城市，那里有大量的人和啮齿动物生活在一起。这就是我们要检验的观点。但为什么这很重要呢？不同的病毒也可以混合它们的基因（技术上讲，重组），因此我们也想知道人类COVID-19是否感染了啮齿动物，它是否会与已经在这些啮齿动物中的其他冠状病毒重组。在最后几句话中有很多“如果”，这是因为这些只是我们的理论。我们现在想看看这些理论--这些“如果”--是否正确。为了做到这一点，我们想捕捉城市居住的大鼠和小鼠，然后我们将筛选人类COVID-19病毒，或它的近亲。

All of us are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is caused by a virus (technically, SARS-CoV-2) that originally jumped from an animal (probably a bat) into a person. Now the virus is spreading person-to-person directly.COVID-19 is a coronavirus, and coronaviruses are very common in wild animals. While each coronavirus typically infects one species of animal, coronaviruses can move between animal species too. So the general idea is that animals are "reservoirs" of viruses that sometimes moves into people.Because so many people are getting infected with COVID-19, we think that humans might now be a virus reservoir infecting animals. If this does happen, it's most likely where there are high densities of people and of animals - such as rodents in cities, where large numbers of people and rodents live cheek-by-jowl. This is the idea we want to test.But why does this matter? Different viruses can also mix their genetics (technically, recombine), and so we also wonder if the human COVID-19 does infect rodents, whether it will then recombine with other coronaviruses already in those rodents. There are a lots of 'ifs' in these last few sentences, which is because these are just theories that we have. We now want to see if these theories - these 'ifs' - are correct. To do this we want to catch city-dwelling rats and mice that we'll then screen for the human COVID-19 virus, or close relatives of it.