This is why I get so frustrated with people justifying continued shutdowns "until it's cured by the vaccine". Almost every highly contagious virus mutates quickly. Same with bacteria. The cat is already out of the bag, even if we do manage to completely eradicate it it'll take years. (To be clear I'm not against virus control measures, I'm just frustrated with the flawed reasoning that all this will just go away when the vaccine is within reach. It couldn't be easier to get a flu shot and yet we'll probably be dealing with the flu long into the future. If we know this will stretch into say 2022 I have to imagine that will change a lot of peoples attitudes as to how society should react)
How the novel coronavirus has evolved
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Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#92This is why I get so frustrated with people justifying continued shutdowns "until it's cured by the vaccine". Almost every highly contagious virus mutates quickly. Same with bacteria. The cat is already out of the bag, even if we do manage to completely eradicate it it'll take years. (To be clear I'm not against virus control measures, I'm just frustrated with the flawed reasoning that all this will just go away when…
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Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#93Since this will continue to be misunderstood, it's important to emphasise that the article explicitly mentions that there is 1. No evidence to support the idea of strains that have any impact on infection 2. No evidence to support the idea that the strains will resist the vaccines or weaken vaccine efficacy. This is not a "strain" in the sense of the flu, COVID-19 hasn't fundamentally changed in any meaningful way th…
The problem with "any" is its usually wrong. Here's an "old" paper from July:
Toyoshima, Y., Nemoto, K., Matsumoto, S. et al. SARS-CoV-2 genomic variations associated with mortality rate of COVID-19. J Hum Genet 65, 1075–1082 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s10038-020-0808-9
The measured variation between the now extinct L strain and the new current G strain is the G strain was about 2% higher correlation between strain and fatality rate. The actual fatality rate was not 2% higher which would be huge, but the % of L in a population vs population fatality rate correlated 2% higher based on euro country data in the spring.
Certainly there's only two real impacts on fatality rate right now, both incredibly politically incorrect to discuss, there's an enormous staggering stunning huge disparity in fatality rate by age, and a merely giant disparity in fatality rate by comorbidity rate. The medical science seems clear, but the political impact makes it impossible to discuss quarantine policies that would minimize total death rates. Hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by locking up everyone over 60 and everyone over 300 pounds and a couple other pre-existing conditions, but AARP is one of the strongest PACs out there and even if it saves her life, grandma will vote out anyone who "locks her up for a year for her own good".
Personally I'm old enough that I'm working very hard to max out my cardio health for when I inevitably get it.
Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#94So it's finally okay to say there's multiple strains with different infectiousness and (possibly) severity? Back in February-ish (I forget exactly when), we had confirmed community spread in Washington (West-coast state in the US), with the belief that it had been spreading for weeks and no one noticed, because of how few cases there were, and no bump in hospitalizations. This was likely the Wuhan strain, which likew…
Can you elaborate on why a lockdown would select for a more virulent strain?
Imagine the original strain had a mortality rate of zero, but later strains had high mortality rates.
The original strain would effectively be a vaccine. The lockdown would be the equivalent of the anti-vaxxers.
There’s no evidence the mortality rate has actually increased; this was just a thought experiment.
In prior pandemics (1918 flu), future strains were more deadly than earlier strains.
The nightmare scenario now is that a COVID-20 emerges with a 5% mortality rate instead of 0.5%. If catching COVID-19 gives you immunity to COVID-20 (and all the vaccines fail), then the lockdown would increase the death toll by 10x.
These are all hypotheticals that looked somewhat plausible in April, and implausible today.
Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#95When this started, I did some visualizing of the virus' code: https://github.com/kordless/covid19_viz That "spike" in the graph comes from sequences in the nucleotides coding the spike on the virus, which is somewhat expected given it's repeated on the surface of the virus membrane. Apparently most of the spike encoding is from a South Asian fish. Reference in the repo.
What do you mean by "most of the spike encoding is from a South Asian fish"?
As in, that's where the virus evolved/stole it from?
Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#96And still there are people who deny that the virus exists.
Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
>On the flipside, when it reached Italy, Only for the record/FYI, there is growing evidence that the virus (cannot say which strain) was present in Italy months before, possibly since September 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim... https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-4632_article
"Some people had antibodies that react with SARS-CoV2 prior to January 2020" isn't great evidence that the virus itself was present prior to 2020. There's some amount of cross-reactivity between antibodies to other human coronaviruses and SARS-CoV2.
Besides that finding, there is the other more recent article, about the actual RNA found.
Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#98When this started, I did some visualizing of the virus' code: https://github.com/kordless/covid19_viz That "spike" in the graph comes from sequences in the nucleotides coding the spike on the virus, which is somewhat expected given it's repeated on the surface of the virus membrane. Apparently most of the spike encoding is from a South Asian fish. Reference in the repo.
What does the South Asian fish comment mean?
Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#99So it's finally okay to say there's multiple strains with different infectiousness and (possibly) severity? Back in February-ish (I forget exactly when), we had confirmed community spread in Washington (West-coast state in the US), with the belief that it had been spreading for weeks and no one noticed, because of how few cases there were, and no bump in hospitalizations. This was likely the Wuhan strain, which likew…
Can you elaborate on why a lockdown would select for a more virulent strain?
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Re: How the novel coronavirus has evolved
#100So it's finally okay to say there's multiple strains with different infectiousness and (possibly) severity? Back in February-ish (I forget exactly when), we had confirmed community spread in Washington (West-coast state in the US), with the belief that it had been spreading for weeks and no one noticed, because of how few cases there were, and no bump in hospitalizations. This was likely the Wuhan strain, which likew…
Can you elaborate on why a lockdown would select for a more virulent strain?
[N.B. mods, deleted accidental dupe comment]
a lockdown would select for a more communicable strain, not a more virulent strain. the big problem is this virus has morbidity latent to infection incubation and transmission.
these conditions mean that the virus can be 100% lethal and not succuum to the usual dynamics