SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
81–90 of 103 posts
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#82Something I have been wondering about, wouldn't a virus naturally evolve to be less deadly and more contagious over time? I.e. virus's tend to achieve a steady state like the cold and flu in the long run. If you are too deadly it hinders spread so I would expect Covid to get less deadly and more contagious over time, which kind of fits the data?
We're unlucky in that Covid takes such a long time to kill. It's a little under a week until symptoms onset, another week until serious illness [1]. Hospital patients aren't dying of Covid until almost 2 weeks after admission [2]. So we're talking about victims dying maybe a month after exposure.
With other illnesses there's evolutionary pressure to be less deadly so that the host doesn't die before infecting others, but that's not a problem for Covid where people are most contagious before symptom onset.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida...
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm getting old. Last 20 years maybe, but I can't name a technology advancement that happened in the last 10 years that I would really miss. To me it seems like most technology is now done for the sake of doing it and solutions are looking for problems. Not to mention all the dystopian surveillance we have now. Rose tinted glasses and all that, the start of the millennium was a much happier time period imo.
How does your age map to this Douglas Adams quote: ”I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything…
With me it applies perfectly. Still on a dumb phone, turned 35 in the year 2000.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#84Something I have been wondering about, wouldn't a virus naturally evolve to be less deadly and more contagious over time? I.e. virus's tend to achieve a steady state like the cold and flu in the long run. If you are too deadly it hinders spread so I would expect Covid to get less deadly and more contagious over time, which kind of fits the data?
Evolution is a random and long-term process. What you're thinking of is natural selection. Even that does not guarantee things will get better. For example, there was a worse second wave of Spanish Flu. Natural selection only implies there's less chance these terrible things will last. And, to adapt an economic adage, "The disease can remain deadly longer than you can remain alive."
Natural selection is the basic mechanism that enables evolution, the one is part of the other.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ND and not BY-SA?
Use of the CC BY ND license is meant to reflect the common practice of sharing academic papers, which was often done informally, as opposed to a paywall. I can send you a copy of my paper; you can pass on copies to colleagues. But in doing so, you wouldn't edit it. That's not a freedom which is necessary for sharing a paper. The paper is a complete product. Moreover it would be a breech of the integrity of the work t…
I thought fair use was automatically disclaimed when you receive an explicit licence, reducing the baseline to taint=derivation (which is the main reason open source developers avoid looking at closed source software that performs similar function), unless your licence specifies otherwise.
And some countries are not signatory to Berne convention, instead to Buenos Aires convention, which is much stricter and does not have a common fair use stipulation.
> Criticism is never a matter of editing someone else's work; it's commenting about the work.
It is. Every consumption is an edit. You edit to remove everything not related to your criticism and add your opinion.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#86One thing isn't clear to me, for lack of background knowledge: have there been several strains since the beginning of the pandemic, or is this study based on evidence of mutation in the wild? It sounds like the former, but since it wasn't explicitly addressed in the abstract, I thought I'd ask.
With our current knowledge we can only say that there's only one strain, but they are accumulating changes randomly. Usually those changes are deletereous (bad for the virus), some are neutral and a very minor amount increase the fitness of the virus (good for the virus).
It has been proposed that one of those mutations (D614G) increases the fitness of the virus. If that was the case, viruses with D614G would slowly take over the population. The problem here is that if some "founder effect" [1] happens, it will appear exactly like some mutation gives an increased fitness but what happened in reality was that some guy travelled to a meeting and infected 100 people.
This mutation was first reported in january-2020 in Germany (AFAIK), so it's a very posible that it was just one of the very first viruses to arrive in Europe and "founded" a new population when the virus was spreading almost freely. Then some scientist noted that a lot of european sequences included the mutation and hipotesized that the change was behind the quick spreading of march and april.
Right now, about 80% of the sequences reported to Gisaid include that mutation, but that is about the same percentage than in april/may. I'm personally inclined to believe that D614G is close to have neutral effects, as other variants of the virus without the mutation are also being quite successful in spreading and keeping themselves in the population.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#87People with a weak immune system should die and that's OK. It's called NATURAL SELECTION.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#88This is what worries me a little about widespread mask use. It will start selecting strains that spread more through aerosols, touch, or are easier to contract.
Masks imposes such a hurdle on spreading that, even in the (incredible improbable) event that some virus strain gained a 20% more effectivity of transmission through masks, the mask itself would be restricting 99.99% of the spreading. Overall it means that in place of 1 transmission each 10,000 contacts with mask you'll have maybe 2-3 transmissions of this super-virus even with masks, but 5,000 transmissions without masks.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conventional wisdom often claims that virus evolve to become less fatal - but I don't think that matches the historical record. There's evidence for influenza virus existing thousands of years before 1918. As such, it seems to have evolved into a much more deadly strain at that point. Reproducing more efficiently is a win for natural selection and will normally result in a dominant strain: whether that strain is more…
> There's evidence for influenza virus existing thousands of years before 1918. As such, it seems to have evolved into a much more deadly strain at that point. Influenza refers to a class of viruses, not a single virus.
You seem to be suggesting that 1918 influenza occurred spontaneously and independently of other influenza? No.
Re: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility
#90Something I have been wondering about, wouldn't a virus naturally evolve to be less deadly and more contagious over time? I.e. virus's tend to achieve a steady state like the cold and flu in the long run. If you are too deadly it hinders spread so I would expect Covid to get less deadly and more contagious over time, which kind of fits the data?
If you look at the death rate compared to March, it is dramatically lower, even though we're having 2x the cases. This could be because of better treatment, or because the virus itself is getting milder.