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Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

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Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#251

Post by dham »

xbkingx wrote: post #178
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction. I find it incredibly fascinating how fast this virus can mutate in order to throw curveballs around our natural and engineered defenses and become more efficient at killing us. How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I thought evolution takes tens of thousands of years. It's not like viruses have giant brains with massive IQs to come up with a…

It speaks to the more serious problem with vaccine hesitancy - the more virions (individual virus 'particles') that exist, the greater the chance of a mutation that finds a way around our defenses. It's just basic evolution. The variants arise randomly and proliferate with the current major strains. The infected population adapts to reduce the transmission of the most virulent/contagious strains. Selective pressure (…

On the other hand the vaccines could be causing more stress on the virus as they generally aren't very good. I'm saying this as someone who had the virus then the vaccine.

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#252

Post by dham »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #206
throwawayboise wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the cases we are seeing are extremely mild" So, like most COVID infections?

“Mild” in this case means you don’t go to the hospital (and/or the morgue). It doesn’t rule out long COVID or extremely severe (from a layman’s perspective) symptoms. And that’s the same as other “mild” COVID infections, yep. The ones where you don’t die. You ignorant dipshit.

Have you never had a severe cold when you were young or did you get one of those stupid attendance trophies in school? Geez. I'm starting to wonder if anyone on Hacker news has ever gone through any hardship.

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#253

Post by ethbr0 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #109
jacquesm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a population of almost 8 billion and a six months head start you are now looking at a reservoir of many millions of people infected at any given time. Each of these will provide 1 to 100 billion new virions, and each of those is an opportunity for the virus to undergo a mutation, which RNA viruses are particularly receptive to because they lack the same level of error correction that DNA based viruses enjoy. Ed…

With that said, then a one sise fits all vacinne is highly unlikely, correct? That there will be variants and mutations that will out pace (so to speak) the protection a given jab is engineered to offer? Long to short, if death prevention is the objective then we need to shift to finding solution that are less specific but still effective. For example, anti virals.

The immune system (and vaccines) operate mostly on the external bits of a viral particle.

These bits perform several critical functions: hiding from the immune system, attaching to cells the virus needs to replicate in, etc.

Changing any of these things results in two questions.

(1) Does the change make the virus better or worse at X? (where X is something related to what that bit was doing)

(2) Does the change make the virus more or less visible / resistant to the immune system?

The answer to both of these are independent, and for any one particular change, depends all the way down to chemistry and physics.

It's possible that a given virus design cannot mutate external features without rendering itself ineffective. It's also possible that relatively minor mutations can make it more effective and/or able to avoid antibodies and the immune system.

The mutation space has been studied for SARS-CoV-2, but to put it simply, it's a very complicated problem that involves (among other things) protein folding and molecular simulation. Not easy stuff to brute force.

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#254

Post by chrisjs95 »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #206
throwawayboise wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the cases we are seeing are extremely mild" So, like most COVID infections?

“Mild” in this case means you don’t go to the hospital (and/or the morgue). It doesn’t rule out long COVID or extremely severe (from a layman’s perspective) symptoms. And that’s the same as other “mild” COVID infections, yep. The ones where you don’t die. You ignorant dipshit.

Let me guess. You're single, have no kids and wear a mask in the car. You're deathly afraid of this virus because you watch CNN everyday. You have 2 doses of vaccine and 5 boosters? You talk about long Covid but haven't been sick in 10 years. The term post viral syndrome is foreign to you?

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#257

Post by tamaharbor »

Like the common cold or the flu, odds are the coronavirus will be with us forever in some form or another. It is unrealistic to create a vaccine for every variant. We should learn how to treat, and allow natural immunity to take over. Take the 0.07% (correction) chance of death.

Edit: Stupid math error.

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#258

Post by h0l0cube »

tamaharbor wrote: post #257

Like the common cold or the flu, odds are the coronavirus will be with us forever in some form or another. It is unrealistic to create a vaccine for every variant. We should learn how to treat, and allow natural immunity to take over. Take the 0.07% (correction) chance of death. Edit: Stupid math error.

> 0.007% chance of death

Not sure if you're being hyperbolic, but the death toll just in the US has surpassed 0.23%

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#259

Post by koheripbal »

tamaharbor wrote: post #257

Like the common cold or the flu, odds are the coronavirus will be with us forever in some form or another. It is unrealistic to create a vaccine for every variant. We should learn how to treat, and allow natural immunity to take over. Take the 0.07% (correction) chance of death. Edit: Stupid math error.

It's very reasonable to give people yearly updated shots. There are big overlaps in the variants so we wouldn't need one for each variant, not to mention you could combine multiple variants in one shot.

Also, your case mortality rate number seems wrong, by orders of magnitude.

Re: Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern

#260

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

crate_barre wrote: post #90
ethbr0 wrote: post #74

Here's the link on CoVariants (aka 21K): https://covariants.org/variants/21K Gives a better breakdown of what we're actually talking about.

Also known as B.1.1.529 Variant21K appears to have arisen in November 2021, possibly in South Africa. Early sequences are predominantly from South Africa, though also detected in Botswana and Hong Kong. 21K is primarily of concern due to the large number of mutations it has in the Spike gene. Many of these variants are in the receptor binding domain and N-terminal domain, and thus may play key roles in ACE2 binding a…

"This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction."

That's a huge part of the pandemic, people are not used to being exposed to that kind of language, so their imagination runs wild.

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