461–465 of 465 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UK is running human challenge trials to determine that. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/new-uk-challenge-trial-stud...
It's not if https://www.fox10tv.com/news/coronavirus/getting-covid-19-tw... https://www.nbclosangeles.com/on-air/one-mans-experience-abo... https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/more-people-are-gett... But how often and what are the consequences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> run through fear mongering More than 4 million people have died so far. If you're going to say it was "fear mongering" then buzz off.
If you aren't aware of all the fear mongering, you're not paying attention.
4 million died, so COVID coverage has the most accurate fear-to-reality alignment the news has ever had.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember reading that the deaths in countries corresponded pretty tightly with obesity levels in the population. If that's true, that throws lots of "evidence" right out the window. Edit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-obesit...
This BBC story speculates that Delta became the main variant in part due to the cold weather. But I'm not sure any one factor can be singled out. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57489740
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what the point of such conjecture is. Of course we don't know how much immunity comes from infection, and it is quite clear from the spread of delta that we are nowhere near herd immunity in the developed world, even in places like Israel. I had a coronavirus called a cold last year; does that mean I'm immune this year? Unlikely in the long term with COVID. The entire concept of herd immunity may be a mi…
> Usually viruses become more transmissible and less lethal in response to rational behavior in their hosts--but humans are proving we're not rational. I was under the impression viruses became less lethal because if they became more, they'd kill off their hosts and be less likely to spread. There's a chance you get some super virus that becomes both more transmissible and lethal, but that is very rare (from what I c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But everything we know about existing respiratory viruses (and indications so far this year) suggest antibodies will wane. Not necessarily the case. Infections with HCoV-229E produces durable immunity and reinfection is due to antigenic drift: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.17.423313v1 That it at odds with prior studies that found ~12 month reinfections with coronaviruses, but it is with considerab…
Setting up two likely scenarios is a very reasonable way of approaching future development, both scenarios sound likely to me. We could look at the flu for clues, in that case every year will have one or more variants that are the most prominent. I'd argue that in the age category with the most infected (10-29 years old) in the UK, that these people are not killing themselves due to their young age. And the elderly h…
By contrast SARS-CoV-2 only has a single chromosome, and so it primarily evolves via "genetic drift". While it's _possible_ for a cell infected by multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants to generate "chimeric" offspring via a process called "crossover" AKA "homologous recombination", that mechanism is much less effective than the simple segment-reassortment that drives flu evolution.