Pumpkin dish Recent findings on the novel Corona

I have digged out the roots as well as their plants of vegetables in the farm. Some tomatoes were withered by the long lasting rain. They might have got certain illness due to too much rain. Long beans won't bloom and were infertile. While pulling them out from the soil, I uttered to them that they had lived as much as they could under this unusually wet weather. 

Three pumpkins were harvested. Remembering some chestnuts cropped last fall were still frozen in the refrigerator, I have decided to cook one of them with that frozen chestnuts.

The pumpkin was well grown.

The dish was pretty successful. The chestnuts were not very fresh after having been frozen for a year. But the pumpkin was freshly rich in flavor. Not only sweet but also rich like fresh chestnuts. The pumpkin has compensated deterioration of the chestnuts.

I won't give up growing tomatoes. I still have some of them ripening at the other corners of the garden. Some new plants of tomatoes were planted at the different places. I bet the sunny and dry weather upcoming will make them ripe in a month or two. 

As for the novel Coronavirus, the 2nd wave outbreak has started in the beginning of the last month. They say a new mutated strain has caused epicenter in Tokyo and Saitama, which is spreading to the other parts of our country. Apparently, the case fatality rate still remains low mainly due to accumulated infection rate in the younger generation. It is spreading more to the older generations and the case fatality rate may be increases sooner or later. 

Vaccine development is heralded by a couple of Mega Pharma, Pfizer and AstraZeneca. The preliminary reports say both were successful to induce neutralizing antibodies as well as specific T cell response. Both of them are in the 3rd phase of trial at present. Hopefully, they will be available by next spring. What concerns me is that, at least, Pfizer's product will be effective against certain strain of the virus. The vaccine should be renewed every season, as the president of Pfizer said. They should be thoroughly tested not to cause aberrant immunological reactions like the cases with RS virus Dengue virus before they are in clinical use.   

Recently, long term sequelles have been reported with this infection. The primary lesion in lung could leave constrictive lung dysfunction and/or diffusion abnormality. It could be chronic respiratory dysfunction. We should remember even asymptomatic cases could occur pneumonia findings once tested with CT scan. Asymptomatic cases won't be free from these severe complications in later life.

It was shocking to me that German researchers reported heart could be infected with the virus in pretty large proportion of cases. Heart failure could be detected in them. Viral infections were known to cause myocardiopathy, which is a pretty ominous illness. This novel Coronavirus could be another pathogen responsible for that illness which sometimes leads to cardiac transplantation. 

This virus seems neurotropic. Infecting through olfactory nerve, it could infect CNS, which could result in degenerative disease like multiple sclerosis in the future. It is only a hypothesis but, if it is true, it could leave us another serious problem.  

We still should be hopeful to control this pandemic. If human being could overcome it as whole, we won't reach the solution. "I win, you lose" won't bring us the solution. We should win together.