Impaired type I interferons (IFNs) production or signaling have been associated with severe COVID-19, further promoting the evaluation of recombinant type I IFNs as therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 infection. In the Syrian hamster model, we show that intranasal administration of IFN-α starting one day pre-infection or one day post-infection limited weight loss and decreased viral lung titers. By contrast, intranasal administration of IFN-α starting at the onset of symptoms three days post-infection had no impact on the clinical course of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our results provide evidence that early type I IFN treatment is beneficial, while late interventions are ineffective, although not associated with signs of enhanced disease.

There is a consensus concerning the view that both auditory and motor representations intervene in the perceptual processing of speech units. However, the question of the functional role of each of these systems remains seldom addressed and poorly understood. We capitalized on the formal framework of Bayesian Programming to develop COSMO (Communicating Objects using Sensory-Motor Operations), an integrative model that allows principled comparisons of purely motor or purely auditory implementations of a speech perception task and tests the gain of efficiency provided by their Bayesian fusion. Here, we show 3 main results: (a) In a set of precisely defined "perfect conditions," auditory and motor theories of speech perception are indistinguishable; (b) When a learning process that mimics speech development is introduced into COSMO, it departs from these perfect conditions. Then auditory recognition becomes more efficient than motor recognition in dealing with learned stimuli, while motor recognition is more efficient in adverse conditions. We interpret this result as a general "auditory-narrowband versus motor-wideband" property; and (c) Simulations of plosive-vowel syllable recognition reveal possible cues from motor recognition for the invariant specification of the place of plosive articulation in context that are lacking in the auditory pathway. This provides COSMO with a second property, where auditory cues would be more efficient for vowel decoding and motor cues for plosive articulation decoding. These simulations provide several predictions, which are in good agreement with experimental data and suggest that there is natural complementarity between auditory and motor processing within a perceptuo-motor theory of speech perception. (PsycINFO Database Record

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), responsible for COVID-19 in people, has been detected in companion animals on rare occasions. A limited number of large-scale studies have investigated the exposure of companion animals to SARS-CoV-2. The objective of this prospective study was to estimate seroprevalence in privately owned dogs and cats presented in veterinary clinics in different French regions and to test the hypothesis that the occurrence of an episode of COVID-19 in the household and close contact with the owner would increase the chances of the animals being seropositive. One hundred and sixty-five dogs and 143 cats were blood-sampled between March 2020 and December 2021. Neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were detected in 8.4% of cats (12/143) and 5.4% of dogs (9/165). Seven animals (three dogs and four cats) were seropositive in the absence of an episode of COVID-19 in the household. Despite not being statistically significant (chi-square test, p-value = 0.55), our data may suggest that the occurrence of an episode of COVID-19 in the household could increase the risk of animal seropositivity (odds ratio = 1.38; 95% confidence interval = 0.55–3.77). This survey indirectly shows that SARS-CoV-2 circulates in canine and feline populations, but its circulation appears to be too low for pets to act as a significant viral reservoir.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for COVID-19 and spread rapidly following its emergence in Wuhan in 2019. Although cats are, among other domestic animals, susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, little is known about their epidemiological role in the dynamics of a household infection. In this study, we monitored five cats for viral shedding daily. Each cat was confined with its COVID-19 positive owners in separate households. Low loads of viral nucleic acid were found in two cats, but only one developed anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, which suggests that cats have a limited role in COVID-19 epidemiology.