An Early Clinical Case of COVID-19 in New York

SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus that causes the human disease COVID-19, was determined to be the cause of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China which began in December 2019 [1]. The first case in the United States reportedly occurred on 20 January 2020 in Washington state in a patient with a history of travel to Wuhan [2]. We report an earlier case of COVID-19 in Queens, New York in November 2019. While it is not perfectly clear from the initial November 2019 emergency department case presentation, if the patient had influenza alone, COVID-19 alone, or combined influenza and COVID-19 infection, presenting lung lesions and constitutional symptoms, later follow-up antibody and immune cell analyses, and the possibility of false-positive RIDT, do strongly suggest initial COVID-19 infection (with or without initial influenza infection). This clinical paper becomes important, because it may describe the earliest now-reported COVID-19 case in the United States, and because emergency department and post-emergency department treatments contributed to a successful patient outcome.

Late Miocene/Early Pliocene vertebrate fauna from Mallorca(Balearic Islands,Western Mediterranean):an update

The vertebrate fossil record from the Balearic Islands(western Mediterranean)has improved considerably over the past decade,especially in Mallorca and Menorca.In Menorca,the Pliocene terrestrial fauna was updated by the discovery and description of the large-sized leporid Nuralagus,several reptiles and an amphibian.In Mal-lorca,paleontological exploration yielded 2 deposits with a Late Miocene/Early Pliocene chronology,Calóden Rafelino(CdR)and Na Burguesa-1(NB-1).So far,4 new mammalian taxa and 2 new reptiles have been iden-tified for the CdR deposit,whereas the faunal assemblage from the recently discovered deposit(Apr 2012)of NB-1 is currently composed of,at least,6 terrestrial mammals,8 reptiles and an amphibian.Its faunal composi-tion and some primitive characteristics of the obtained taxa suggest that the chronology of this deposit is slight-ly earlier than the CdR.The terrestrial vertebrates recorded in these 2 Mallorcan deposits are changing the view of the paleofaunal assemblage previously known for the Plio-Pleistocene of the island.Morphological charac-teristics displayed by some of the taxa suggest that these faunas would be at the beginning of an isolated evo-lution.In this paper we present a preliminary report on the fossils recovered from the NB-1 deposit,as well as some unpublished data from CdR,and we analyze the whole fauna from both Mallorcan deposits,focusing on taxonomical and paleobiogeographical aspects.