311–320 of 1001 posts
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Do you have a source that says covid did not contribute to the death of the UK patient?
Just the quote that says "with" instead of "from" until the data is released.
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That’s only one pressure driving viral evolution. Another pressure is social response to infection: so far, the predominant response to a more-virulent or more-lethal strain has been lockdown and/or other behavioral change, see: delta in India. On the flip side, a variant that causes milder symptoms is less likely to cause the same social response, which allows the virus to spread more widely. This may (may!) be what…
Do you realise that mutation is not something the species can consciously control? How could the virus have mutated to become milder to suit the social response if the society, as it stands today, is continuing to do what they previously did..?
When a more severe variant starts dominating and everyone goes inside and stops spreading it that makes the more severe variant die out. As it dies out, and people go outside, variants that are milder will thrive because people won't lockdown as easily. This can repeat forever until eventually the virus is completely benign. Of course it's all based on randomness so it's not exactly predictable what will happen.
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I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).
How can a virus have a "strategy" when all which occurs are random mutations during replication? I wonder about this a lot.
A random mutation that causes the virus to be more mild would cause people to rationally take fewer precautions against it. Then it gets to spread more, which is evolutionarily advantageous to the virus, but it doesn't kill as many people, which is advantageous to humans.
Note that there are a ton of viruses people get infected by on a regular basis that don't even have symptoms. Those viruses "spread like the plague" but because they're not the plague, nobody cares.
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I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).
How can a virus have a "strategy" when all which occurs are random mutations during replication? I wonder about this a lot.
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Driving has benefits. Getting infected with COVID does not.
These statements don't follow from anything anyone has said. You would need to compare the benefits of driving to the benefits of living a normal life, and compare that to the risks of dying from each. Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits? What are you trying to say?
Why do you think you get a choice? Without extreme measures of staying locked up, most everyone will encounter the virus. Why not help your body deal with it by going for a walk today to get some exercise? Life is to live, not eat ourselves to overweight deaths.
Did anyone notice the comparison of vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity in the findings within the source PR [0]? With a little work, you can compare them. If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection. Unf…
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I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).
How can a virus have a "strategy" when all which occurs are random mutations during replication? I wonder about this a lot.
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"Everything seems pretty good so far" There shortages of hospital beds across many states [0] If you want a full perspective on things, look further than your own state. Unless you live in Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska, North Dakota, or Montana then everything is not going very well. Most people don't live in these states, and many of the states with loose mask mandates are not in that short list. A small are just about…
"cases" is not really a relevant variable anymore. It's been two years of a "pandemic" and I don't know a single person who's died from this ting yet. Of course, none of my Seattle neighbors will go out to walk their dog without wearing 3 masks.
As for your experience, it is not predictive or representative given the ~800,000 US deaths. Especially because you live in an admittedly very cautious area.
The title is misleading. It is possible that Omicron is just as severe and that the effect in the study is because a large percentage of the population had some immunity from a previous infection or vaccine. > South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a…
I don't think that it is misleading. The severity of a disease is relative to the current situation. For example, it could be the case that Omicron is actually less infectious than the original variant, when compared in the setting of 2020. It spreads faster today because, (i) because of preexisting immunity most cases are very mild, and so lots of people become unwitting carriers, (ii) people have gone back to norma…
* variant "D" that kills 1% of the 20% of the population that isn't seropositive
* variant "O" that kills 1% of the 20% of the population that isn't seropositive and 0.2% of the 80% of the population that is seropositive
The takeaway is "good news everyone, variant O is less severe!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only one pressure driving viral evolution. Another pressure is social response to infection: so far, the predominant response to a more-virulent or more-lethal strain has been lockdown and/or other behavioral change, see: delta in India. On the flip side, a variant that causes milder symptoms is less likely to cause the same social response, which allows the virus to spread more widely. This may (may!) be what…
Do you realise that mutation is not something the species can consciously control? How could the virus have mutated to become milder to suit the social response if the society, as it stands today, is continuing to do what they previously did..?