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The mutation that helps Delta spread

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Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#341

Post by corpMaverick »

hncurious wrote: post #70

Covid is going to be endemic like the flu and cold. It's not going to be eradicated, unfortunately, and I don't think we've come to terms with this yet. Now what's our plan exactly? Get vaccinated every 6 - 12 months indefinitely and always wear masks? What's our goal and what's our new normal?

We are better of if we vaccinate every 6-12 months. We are better of if we keep some social distance measures. So we should keep doing this as long as it is the better option. The goal is continue with our lives with the least damage from the virus.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#342

Post by loceng »

jdavis703 wrote: post #165
hncurious wrote: post #70

Covid is going to be endemic like the flu and cold. It's not going to be eradicated, unfortunately, and I don't think we've come to terms with this yet. Now what's our plan exactly? Get vaccinated every 6 - 12 months indefinitely and always wear masks? What's our goal and what's our new normal?

Yeah, as long as COVID-19 fills up hospitals we should do this. Not having hospitals seriously compromises quality of life. I had untreated kidney stones for about a week at the peak of the pandemic. When I was in the middle of an attack I could not work, the pain was too severe. I was missing several hours of work everyday just dealing with pain. I finally got to the emergency room which did basic imaging and gave m…

How about also starting mass campaign to get people healthy and taking appropriate supplements - using carrots where necessary?

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#343

Post by munk-a »

theonething wrote: post #330
munk-a wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is not a few months problem I agree that it was never a few months problem - but I think we had a window to stamp it out and low vaccination production and adoption rates have killed that window dead. I don't believe it's impossible that we beat this - but I would not be surprised if mutation rates simply outrun vaccination adaptation.

> I think we had a window to stamp it out What do you base that on? That seems highly unlikely to me. Even as the virus tapers down in one country, it or a variant surges back in five others and then it spreads to others. I haven't seen any chance of stamping that out.

I mainly have a view into how Canada responded to the virus - and we did things okay-ish but weren't at emergency levels. Canada provided a lot of pre-orders for doses to try and spur private research into the vaccine (provide a monetary incentive) but it really lagged on any serious investment into nationalized production facilities with the main assumed acquisition method being purchasing them abroad. In March 2020 we all knew that there would eventually be a strong need to produce a vaccine (or like... we'd all die - it was one of those two options) and Canada is a relatively economically advanced nation with the capability (and public will - unlike the US) to build large non-private vaccination production facilities. This likely would drive long term employment as well as helping to fight against the pandemic.

The world could have seen this pandemic and gone all war-industry on it - convert factories and gear up production as if the nazis were days away from invading our shores - we simply didn't.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#344

Post by [deleted] »

hncurious wrote: post #70

Covid is going to be endemic like the flu and cold. It's not going to be eradicated, unfortunately, and I don't think we've come to terms with this yet. Now what's our plan exactly? Get vaccinated every 6 - 12 months indefinitely and always wear masks? What's our goal and what's our new normal?

[deleted]

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#345

Post by tunesmith »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #335
tunesmith wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what that is. Put a bacteria and an antibiotic in a petri dish, and the bacteria can evolve in a way that has greater antibiotic resistance. Put a vaccine in a petri dish with a virus, and nothing happens. Bacteria are living organisms. Viruses are not.

Viruses are subject to selection, mutation, and heredity. These are the three necessary ingredients for Darwinian evolution. Whether they're defined as "life" or not isn't really relevant. (Personally, I have a pet definition of "life" that just equates it to being subject to Darwinian evolution. Viruses not being defined as life never sat well with me) Vaccines can't do their thing in a petri dish, they need an immu…

I just keep seeing repeats of logic like this (this example from this random article: https://www.unitypoint.org/article.aspx?id=db428f77-6e61-497... )

"The creation of a vaccine for any new virus could also cause additional mutations.

“Let’s explain this concept a little further. Any virus will keep trying to change, so it can continue to spread. With all vaccines, the more quickly people get vaccinated the better. The slower vaccination happens, the higher the chance of having mutations in the virus and the appearance of more variants. And, as we are seeing with the delta variant, the more the virus can spread in the community.""

Isn't that just completely wrong? Saying that the vaccine "caused" that mutation when it was actually the lack of the vaccine that caused it?

Here's another one, a friggin NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965703047/vaccines-could-driv...). It says "At the same time, vaccines can contribute to virus mutations" while the article itself is really only describing that it's the lack of vaccines that yield more time/opportunity for the virus to mutate. Why do people keep saying the virus causes the mutations? It's completely irresponsible.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#346

Post by nine_k »

criticaltinker wrote: post #227
jdavis703 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as long as COVID-19 fills up hospitals we should do this. Not having hospitals seriously compromises quality of life. I had untreated kidney stones for about a week at the peak of the pandemic. When I was in the middle of an attack I could not work, the pain was too severe. I was missing several hours of work everyday just dealing with pain. I finally got to the emergency room which did basic imaging and gave m…

First off, I'm sorry you had to suffer like that - and I don't want anyone to be denied healthcare. > I’d rather vaccinate and mask up then be denied healthcare You've presented a false dichotomy here - mass vaccination and masking will not necessarily prevent overwhelmed hospitals. Israel is a prime example - with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world - their hospitals are being overwhelmed right now due…

Did you notice the distinct lack of flu outbreak last winter? I suppose marks and social distancing just prevented it altogether.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#347

Post by vkou »

walterbell wrote: post #325
vkou wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don't become immune after surviving COVID, many people have caught it multiple times, now.

The most recent UK data shows 137 confirmed cases of reinfection out of 5.2 million first-positive PCR tests, which works out to 0.003%, see the chart on page 18, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

No, it's not 137 confirmed re-infections. It's 35,124 re-infections, 137 of which were analyzed in a particular way.

Your understanding of the situation differs by two and a half orders of magnitude from reality.

And that number has nowhere to go but up, as antibody levels in survivors drop.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#348

Post by Barrin92 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #314
bingohbangoh wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think we'll be keeping up the mask wearing given that "more variants are inevitably coming?"

It has to end at some point, and for me and most other people where I live in the US, it mostly has.

>It has to end at some point

In some countries at least it might become normalized the same way it has in say Japan or Singapore with a history of respiratory disease, the UK does not have the same aversion to public health measures as the US.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#349

Post by [deleted] »

aplummer wrote: post #285
civilized wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compulsory mass vaccination using the current vaccines poses a serious public health risk [1][2][3] None of your references say this or anything remotely implying this. Backing up a provocative claim with a snowblind of irrelevant references is a shameful misinformation tactic and you should stop doing it immediately. Doing it in a public health context is particularly dangerous and frankly disgusting.

Thanks for adding this. Compulsory mass vaccination is one of the greatest medical miracles in human history, possibly the actual single greatest. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_lung#/media/File:Poumon_a...

[deleted]

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#350

Post by [deleted] »

Trasmatta wrote: post #291
raphlinus wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buckle up. Quoted tweet[1] below: Congrats to Ben Jackson, @maciekboni, @viralverity, @AineToole, @robertson_lab, @EvolveDotZoo, @arambaut et al for their recent Cell paper. Rock solid evidence of alpha/non-alpha recombination in #SARSCoV2 in the UK. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00984-3 [1]: https://twitter.com/MichaelWorobey/status/142851583662971699...

Can somebody ELI5 what this means, and what the implications are?

[deleted]
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