Toehold-controlled ligation and transcription for accurate COVID-19 genotyping.

The global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has significant impact on the entire human society. However, in the face of continually emerging more contagious SARS-CoV-2 variant, the risk to bog down into more severe crisis is around us anytime. Here, we introduce an isothermal, ultrasensitive method for identifying important SNV mutations of SARS-CoV-2. It is based on combined specificity of toehold-assisted linear probe ligation and in vitro transcription signal enlargement, TLT. A ready-to-use panel of TLT assay is developed including detection of 80 crucial SARS-CoV-2 SNVs, by which people could response to the next coming contagious virus variant more rapidly. These advanced point-of-care features make TLT one good approach for large scale population testing of special SARS-CoV-2 variants of interesting.

Analyst Forecasts during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from REITs

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupts capital markets and confuses decision makers. This event represents an opportunity to better understand how financial analysts forecast earnings. We focus on forecasts for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the United States, since REITs are relatively transparent during normal times, and since the real estate sector, as a whole, displays wide variations in forecasts during the pandemic. Using data between October 2018 and November 2020, our regression analysis finds that the severity of the pandemic increases analysts’ forecast error and dispersion. Government interventions have an offsetting effect, which is relevant during the more severe times. These results are robust to various measures of the severity of the pandemic. We also find that the pandemic has differential effects across property types, where forecast error rises by more, for REITs, when focusing on Hospitality and Industrial properties, and dispersion rises by more, for REITs, when focusing on Hospitality, Retail, and Technology properties.