A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

> I'd love to never hear about another coronavirus again.

We should definitely hear about coronavirus again and again until everyone learns that millions of people might die unless we completely master immunology. Public awareness, safety measures, and vaccine development should get as much attention as possible until we have a pipeline that allows to develop and distribute vaccines in a matter of months. We never know what next pandemic might strike.

They didn't. That's what drives accumulation of specific mutations which are mentioned in the article. To be clear, large part of population died off (before they could reproduce) simply because they happened to get slightly more susceptible genes.

Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But that's knowledge, not a skill. Good journalists rely on experts, and better journalists rely on multiple experts (for a topic, but also over time) to derive a sense of what's unknown and uncertain in a field.

On social media nothing is ever unknown because there's always a large and emphatic group--some of whom will have PhDs, MDs, and other high-quality credentials--telling you with absolute certainty the way things are, and that's reflected in modern journalism. Not necessarily the certainty, per se, as outside academia the certainty of most information is inflated; but the shear breadth and depth of what's reported.

To be clear, "young" to me includes people in their 30s and 40s, which also happens to be my age group. I've been watching in real-time the turnover over the past several years of radio journalists (NPR affiliates, etc) and print publications and I definitely see a change. The level of credulity is much too high, as is the level of partisanship. For nearly 15 years I disagreed vehemently with claims that such outlets were too partisan (notwithstanding FOX News and similar outlets), but over the past several years I can no longer sustain such defenses. The latest generation of journalists don't believe they're partisan because they believe the information they share is rooted in science, but real science is contingent, and the further away you get from hard science the greater the uncertainty in various claims, but because "science" discourse has become pseudo-religious and partisan the reality of this is lost.

When you read a research paper, coming across the complexity and diversity of approaches and results is one of the most important aspects of the experience. It's difficult for experts, let alone journalists, to convey uncertainty and inconsistency. That's why it's so important, if you can, to read primary sources yourself. It doesn't matter whether you can understand the chemistry or calculus behind results. You can simply take the results and claims at face value, which in the vast majority of cases is how they'll be presented to you through the media. What matters is synthesizing the importance of the gaps that come into focus after reading many papers in a field.

> Should it though?

Fuck no. I'm really tired of these stories.

(this is all directed at the author that put that "it should make us worry" quote in the NYT piece, not at any HN poster, but I really need to vent)

The 1918 pandemic turned into seasonal influenza one we had enough herd immunity, enough people had T-cells that recognized H1N1 and the virus was forced into making sacrificial choices in order to spread.

This virus will not achieve an escape mutation that puts us back to square one with vaccinated or recovered people at the same risk everyone was at in 2019.

If you look at what happened in 2009 the H1 envelope protein of that virus traces its lineage back to the 1918 pandemic, it spent 50 years mutating in pigs before it jumped back to humans (that is a LOT of generations of fucking "variants") and people who were born and exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 when it was endemic to the human race had cross reactive T-cells which protected them. They still got infected, but the disease burden was vastly lower so that pandemic fizzled:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21653752/

The human immune system isn't a binary on/off switch, and while circulating neutralizing antibodies are the gold standard of immunity they are far from the entire story.

If you want to read an article supporting the idea that the coronavirus will transition to milder endemicity without all the irritated swearing read this:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741

And everyone can fuck off in advance about the idea that ADE will happen. If it was going to happen it would have already happened and this isn't Dengue:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/12/an...

All the fucking headlines about how 99% of the people who are dying now are unvaccinated are screaming out that there's no fucking ADE anywhere to be found. People still talking about ADE need to see a psychiatrist to deal with their addiction to doom and gloom.

This pandemic is ending. I'm 2 months post vaccination and everyone I'm in close contact with is vaccinated, so its pretty much entirely over for me.

Now I need a fucking snickers bar.

50% of them didn't