131–140 of 1001 posts
Yes. Covid will continue to mutate to become more contagious and less deadly. This is the natural progression of endemic viruses, they don't want to kill their hosts and they want to spread.
Viruses have no agency, will or desires.
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> I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk. You are forgetting about the most vulnerable group of all: immunosuppressed people. They cannot mount a sufficient immune response, in severe immunosuppression like after a transplant event months or years after.…
This may come off wrong but... COVID is not the first virus. Immunosuppressed people for all of human history have been falling victim to the common cold, the flu and other infections most humans can deal with safely. You can't stop the world economy and the benefit that brings to the majority of society to save a fraction of a percentage point of the population that is Immunocompromised.
I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve? I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while t…
I am not a professional. I have been basing a lot of my virus information from Tomas Pueyo. Here is my source: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-omicron-qu... In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread). The asymptotic nature of Covid sort of broke this assumption because Covid can lie dormant in someone for a we…
Also, those who do not get symptoms (that is, most who catch covid) do not spread the virus in general, which is why it's now called "presymptomatic" spread.
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It depends on what you call severity. If severity means the host dies quickly rather than slowly, there's obviously selection pressure and that mutation will die off relatively quickly vs the rest, since it won't have as many chances to spread as the less severe strain. E.g. SARS/MERS. If severity means the host dies more often, but it still takes a long time to die, the selection pressure is much lower, and it will…
Spanish Flu did evolve to become more mild. All modern seasonal flu variants are descended from it.
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Wanting something to be true does not make it true. Even if it turns up to actually be true , the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true. The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “i…
Don't all viruses become more mild over time? Even Ebola gets much less lethal towards the end of an outbreak as it evolves to preserve its habitat. Small pox is a possible counter ecample it seems like it was pretty lethal for millennia.
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> I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk. You are forgetting about the most vulnerable group of all: immunosuppressed people. They cannot mount a sufficient immune response, in severe immunosuppression like after a transplant event months or years after.…
I live in a state where mask mandates are essentially gone. Very few people wear masks here and they are not required in schools so only ~5% of kids are wearing them at my children's elementary school. Everything seems pretty good so far, no marked rise in cases and almost no cases in my kids school over the last year, maybe 25 total, all mild. I am in no way saying masks don't work, in fact I think that they do. Wit…
Both of these may be widely available in the US quite soon.
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>Probably naive to think we could totally eradicate it within a couple of years, particularly as far as vaccine fearmongering is concerned. Would be nice to see it join Smallpox and Polio though. We would have to completely redesign our current method of vaccination, then. We do not have a sterilizing vaccine for COVID (like we did for smallpox and polio). The current vaccines all use spike proteins to prepare a body…
Would someone who is flagging this comment please, instead, respond to it? If it is so trivially dismissed, please show the rest of us.
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Wanting something to be true does not make it true. Even if it turns up to actually be true , the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true. The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “i…
Don't all viruses become more mild over time? Even Ebola gets much less lethal towards the end of an outbreak as it evolves to preserve its habitat. Small pox is a possible counter ecample it seems like it was pretty lethal for millennia.
No, it doesn't.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
> The claim makes a broad generalization about pathogens that’s not supported by science. It has been well-documented that pathogens can evolve to be more virulent. And many viruses, including HIV and Ebola, have in fact become more lethal over time.
As you note, smallpox disproves the idea that viruses automatically become mild. It had thousands of years to do so and carried a 30% mortality rate still.
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I live in a state where mask mandates are essentially gone. Very few people wear masks here and they are not required in schools so only ~5% of kids are wearing them at my children's elementary school. Everything seems pretty good so far, no marked rise in cases and almost no cases in my kids school over the last year, maybe 25 total, all mild. I am in no way saying masks don't work, in fact I think that they do. Wit…
> I am in no way saying masks don't work, in fact I think that they do. This is still so hilarious to me. It's pretty obvious that some masks work, that is, n95 or whatever actual respirator masks. It's pretty obvious that other masks don't work at all, that is, 99.99% of masks worn by the public at large.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
Yes. Covid will continue to mutate to become more contagious and less deadly. This is the natural progression of endemic viruses, they don't want to kill their hosts and they want to spread.
Viruses have no agency, will or desires.