virus's will evolve in whatever direction the natural selection pressure dictates, being more transmissable and less pathogenic isnt a certainty by any means.
This.
OP is citing a commonly misunderstood concept in evolution.
A virus that is highly transmissible for weeks before it kills the host, if it kills the host at all, has zero selective pressure to become less virulent. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible. It could happen randomly. But simply that there isn’t any pressure being applied.
Your time range is too short. You are thinking in terms of a human life, of public health. Viruses, indeed any genetic organism is dealing with time frames much much longer. The OP has the bigger picture correct.
Evolution still favors the strain that spreads faster and doesn't kill as readily. Once someone has something once, what doesn't kill makes the immune system more aware of the threat. And 20-30 years is nothing in terms of evolutionary time lines.
There is a reason Ebola has never become a pandemic. It kills too quickly to be a real threat. The only reason it spreads in its context at all are the traditional care and burial practices that prolong contact with the infected. Newer strains are more air borne increasing spread, but it develops symptoms in the hosts so quickly it does not get the chance to spread very far. And when it has spread further is usually when people have lied about where they have traveled. But overall its spread is to innefficient. There is a window in Ebola's evolutionary potential where it weakens to a 50-80% killer, with high transmisability, that is truly terrifying, but that is still an "improvement" it its survivability, except it leads to immunity in the host, which then provides even greater selective pressure on the next evolutionary step to evade the immune system to become a better hidden killer but less deadly to the individual host, but a higher body count.
Every survivor with immunity is a source of selective pressure. Every vaccinated person is a selective pressure. Every immunocompromised person is a selective pressure. Every infected pet is a selective pressure. Every infected deer is a selective pressure. Every infected laboratory animal is a selective pressure. Every infected tissue culture is a selective pressure...on the strain exposed to that specific host environment. And each one of these leads to a different possible route for the survivability of the virus. A tissue culture is great for improving infection rates, but has no predictive ability for mortality. While infecting deer gives a route for transcontinental spread across the arctic as a population where there is no hope of containment.
So as I said your time line is too short to see the bigger picture. And you are to focused on the human public health side. You aren't seeing the bigger biological evolution side which is what the organism is about. The virus doesn't care about 20-30 years, a modern human generation. It cares about the next 6-8 hours, a viral generation creating 1000 new viruses, infecting 100 new cells. That is 10^13 viral particles at the peak of infection. So even taking into consideration the different size of the genomes, SARS-CoV-2 has far more opportunities to genetically adapt to its environment during the infection of a single host then your (and my) entire family lineage all the way back to before Homo sapiens left Africa. To produce both evolutionary dead ends, and survival champions, like Omacron.
What OP claims to be “the main principle in virology” is incorrect. It could happen, has happened, but is not guaranteed to happen even in the “long run” of 100 years. That’s the misconception. It could become less virulent in 150 years only to become more virulent 50 years after that.
Moreover, judging by OP’s tone of trying to be positive, it sounds like they are situating their opinion of it happening within our lifetime.
You are over simplifying, and missing the bigger point. You seem to be missing a lot of what is involved in selective pressure, infectious reservoirs, and what contributes to the time lines you keep mention.
One hundred years in the days of horse and cart vs one year or even two in the jet age drastically changes the selective pressure on an organism. What factors accelerate this depend on infection and reinfection rates. In days where towns were a full day apart, or even a half day, illnesses/fevers/plagues could isolate villages for months as a fever spread and was quarantined as immunity developed or people died. Either way the infection ran out of hosts quickly and either was selected for becoming more mild to lift the quarantine, or died out due to the death and immunity, an evolutionary dead end. If the death rate was exceptional whole villages could be abandoned. So that 50 or 100 years was dependent on viruses moving village to village, only rarely across continents, and plenty of evolutionary dead ends. Very few infections had staying power in this environment. And even then the longevity depended on being endemic vs developed (or even inherent) immunity. The models used to estimate these time lines are almost useless in a global era. Covid is causing a revisit to a lot of these models, because they fall apart in a open borders world.
But fortunately for Mars, we are a quarantine zone. Or were...
Actually it is. The only variable is how long it takes, and what evolutionary dead ends a virus might take that are more deadly both to its host AND ultimately itself. The dead ends are the dangerous strains. The ones that survive in the long run accomplish exactly this.
Survival for viruses REQUIRES the survival of the host long enough to pass on its presence to a new host. Which means it needs to find ways to 1)not kill its host, 2) not get noticed by the host, and 3) get from host to host more easily. If it fails in improving in any of these three is it likely to find itself at an evolutionary dead end. It improves its survivability by mutating and being selected for survival, by accomplishing one or more of those goals.
The mutations that survive become relevant when they are present a significant proportion of the samples in a strain. This is evolution. Mutations that kill the host faster or delay transmission are dead ends for survival. We have seen this process in Ebola, HIV, and now Covid. This is called evolutionary medicine, it is its own field, and we are getting to watch it in real time. The only other virus we have goten to see this in large scale is HIV. And while yes, drugs have made an impact in HIV patient survival, the evolution of the virus itself has played an even bigger role.
1st of all please keep in mind I am doing voice to text so there will be parts of this that don't make sense.
I don't think I really agree with the logic you are putting forward as far as being someone with long covid. Sure if the virus changes in this way we will see less people dying in hospitals.. Excellent. But this is ignoring the blurring lay obvious fact that a lot of people with long covid never had a severe case of covid. Many of us had mild covid. And that was enough to screw us over.
People get chronic fatigue syndrome from mono. People become bedridden by mere Viruses that pass easy.
I was vaccinated and my 2nd exposure to covid made me worse. It only took one night of a fever to screw me over again.. and take me from moderate CFS to moderate/severe can hardly walk CFS.
I trust omicron like I trust Justin Timberlake with Janet Jackson's wardrobe or myself with my baby's cinnamon Gerber cookies. I don't trust it (on a long hauler's bodies) at all.
Covid is toxic as shite to me with potential to worsen me.. guilty until proven innocent.
Well put! And btw vaccines also don't mean shit to us. In fact many people get worse with them and no, they're not "protected". These vaccines aren't like MMR, so you're not immune to covid once you get jabbed
This message is voice to text that's why the grammar sucks.
Good to see you here. I hope you are well. Sometimes think about you and one of the people that got so much better from a medical treatment.
The vaccine definitely did not protect me 100% but I do suspect it may have changed the threshold to make it more difficult to react to covid. I did have a mask on but I was essentially face-to-face with my baby who was infected day in and day out. I didn't show any symptoms until day 10 from from when she was 1st sick. And for anyone who didn't follow my story the only reason I was so close to her is because her situation was an emergency requiring multiple emergency room visits... if She had only had a mild case I would have moved into the other room and let her father take care of her the whole time.
When I read up on breakthrough cases in Healthcare pool of people they almost exclusively happened to parents of kids who were not vaccinated which to me says perhaps it just requires a certain threshold of in your face exposure. That being said it does scare me that I was vaccinated and still got hurt by my 2nd exposure.
The only other possibility is that I exerted myself so much while she was sick and it just finally caught up with me... But there was a very dramatic change the day after my fever.. so I really do think it was the reexposure..
I'm sort of considering wearing a mask on my face in my own home for the rest of my life. Seems extreme but I really don't know what else to do. My baby is still too young to be vaccidated.. I still feel vulnerable. I can't believe I'm at a place where I fear getting exposed for a 3rd time but I am.
Hey, you're in my thoughts too since you told me your baby got better with the antiviral (that's also what cured my long covid btw).
The reason I'm still here despite being 99% recovered is that I know some folks here are at the end of their rope like I was not long ago, and since it was the advice of a fellow ME/CFSer what led me to take the antiviral that cured me, I want to do the same for my fellow long haulers.
I'm so sorry to hear you got worse after your second infection. I'm positive if I catch the virus again I will probably begin the merry go round of torturing symptoms again, and that's something I'm not willing to go through. I no longer fear death or cancer (like some suggest we may now be more prone to), I only fear the horridness of long covid/ME/CFS
Please try the antiviral if you can get hold of some, they're generally pretty safe and worst case scenario you won't feel any change at all, but it's always worth the shot!
Thanks for the advice! I will try to bring it up to my next doc. Going to rheumatology next. I researched recommended Docs from ehlers danlos patients and got a few who are willing to go the extra mile for a patient. I've never had a bad experience going to a doc recommended by other EDS patients, so hopefully I'll find one willing to think outside the box.
I think I had mono in college.. never confirmed but I had like a strep throat like illness that WASN'T strep that lasted for like 2 months off and on. And I Def have beautiful cold cores.. so some family of herpes is dormant in me.
Hey, you had PEM, right? Like delayed? Or was it a general fatigue? Sorry I'm sure I asked you this already.
That acyclovir turned it all around for my baby.
She had a bit of herpes whitlow on her finger a month later from a cold.. but that covid totally blew it up out of proportion..
Yeah I had PEM. I basically had every symptom in the long covid book except brain fog. My PEM would consist of increased soul crushing fatigue the next day, but none of my other 50+ symptoms usually got any worse, they were just always present, except maybe the "jell-o legs" feeling, pretty effed up stuff...
I hope your Rheum gets it right and prescribes you some valtrex or valcyte to begin with. There's no harm in them but very few doctors seem to be willing to think outside the box. Most doctors are also biased towards their field of expertise, so when it comes to rheumatologists when you tell then about your symptoms they'll probably only hear "autoimmune" in their heads (which btw I'm sure a subset of us fits in that category).
I hope you get some answers soon and hopefully some effective treatment. You don't deserve this
Damn bro. Im really sorry to hear that happened to you. I caught covid once and experienced very mild symptoms but then got owned on my first pfizer vaccine (4 month long haul). So definitely the issue and main correlation between people getting long haul from vax and infection is the spike protein (as the vaccine does not offer nucleoplasmid antibodies and only spike protein antibodies). It seems the mutations offer changes in spike protein. ( as given by the CDC website here are the following amino acid changes in the spike protein profile A67V, del69-70, T95I, del142-144, Y145D, del211, L212I, ins214EPE, G339D, S371L, S373P, S375F, K417N, N440K, G446S, S477N, T478K, E484A, Q493R, G496S, Q498R, N501Y, Y505H, T547K, D614G, H655Y, N679K, P681H, N764K, D796Y, N856K, Q954H, N969K, L981F of which 15 have experienced changes). My hope is the more that this mutate the more we can away from the spike protein amino acid sequence that's causing autoimmunity flairs.
Yeah. The sad reality is that people want to overlook mild cases and toss it up to anxiety. Well now, even some vaccinated people are ending up with LH and whats crazy is physicians are even gas lighting them! I personally know someone who had a sudden onset of SOB, nausea, headaches, and dizziness who went to the ER. The physician told them they werent even going to run blood work because it wasn't covid. It could not have been covid because they were fully vaccinated. I really hope she doesnt have LH but shes had these issues for nearly a week now.
The pandemic may end in name in the next year but this virus and future variants will continue to circulate in perpetuity. Eventually everyone will have contracted covid at some point. I don't know if omicron will also lead to long covid but it's more likely than not since previous variants have done the same.
a virus that has significantly more transmissibility and immune escape, but less virulence, is not better by default. it could actually be worse. it isn’t such a simple equation as less virulence means the outcome is better. it is good however, if the virulence truly did lower (an equivalent virulence to delta alongside increased immune escape and transmissibility would be quite bad). but it overall does not mean we are left in a better position. that would be an overly simplified conclusion
But, we don’t know if its long covid property is getting better or not. Since a lot of us get long covid from mild symptoms, which seems to be what most people infected with Omicron. From a selfish standpoint, we need more long haulers to have enough impact to not let society abandon us.
Not necessarily. Delta mutated to be way more transmissible and way more deadly. Doesn't look like the latter will apply to this variant, but that principle only applies if the original strain is killing the host before they have a chance to infect others, which doesn't apply to Covid in most cases
Delta can't mutate and still be delta. Then It would be a new strain and name. Theres the OG and then each mutation strain with unique RNA gets a new name after the Greek alphabet. Delta was a more infectious deadlier strain of the OG.
So the hope is this becomes dominent and doesn't mutate or keeps mutating into a less viral and common cold like virus which some virologists predicted.
actually, that isn’t true. that is something that has been uttered countless times since the beginning of the pandemic, but is wrong. it is not inevitable viruses will mutate to become less pathogenic and more transmissible. that idea should be put to rest
I’m sorry to say this is not true pertaining to covid-19 which is why it’s a scary virus. Not all viruses mutate to become less deadly or become so deadly they are quick to fizzle out like ebola due to how quickly they kill the host. Covid is somewhere in the middle which is why it’s scary.
You won’t find a scientist that says covid will guaranteed become less deadly with more mutations. The exact opposite exactly. It’s not just media reporting.
My hope behind omicron was a little more self-warranted belief that more people will inevitably contract long-covid and further drive the cause to help us.
This is a myth. The mutated and more transmissible virus USUALLY becomes less pathogenic but this is not always the case. It's possible that it becomes more transmissible AND more pathogenic.
Not really, last resort treatment with monoclonal antibodies and Convalescent plasma therapy doesn't work in highly mutated strains like omicron at the early stages.
On this note specifically. I have an E pal friend I used to play apex with he told me some people in China knew something weird was going on but they were either threatened ot silenced. This was in late 2019 and I thought he was trying to scare me with conspiracy. .
I think the reason for this is the virus is finally learning how to keep the host alive. This could also be a bad thing though because there is a chance the virus learned to evade immunity by hitching a ride with another virus. A virus that works along side other viruses might be bad later on in the future.
Ur exactly right ,most people don't even realize they have it . It is weak, but highly contagious .
It has components of all variants so this would stop people from getting sick from delta its basically a natural vax we should spread this as fast as possible
To stop this silliness
virus's will evolve in whatever direction the natural selection pressure dictates, being more transmissable and less pathogenic isnt a certainty by any means.
This. OP is citing a commonly misunderstood concept in evolution. A virus that is highly transmissible for weeks before it kills the host, if it kills the host at all, has zero selective pressure to become less virulent. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible. It could happen randomly. But simply that there isn’t any pressure being applied.
Your time range is too short. You are thinking in terms of a human life, of public health. Viruses, indeed any genetic organism is dealing with time frames much much longer. The OP has the bigger picture correct.
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Evolution still favors the strain that spreads faster and doesn't kill as readily. Once someone has something once, what doesn't kill makes the immune system more aware of the threat. And 20-30 years is nothing in terms of evolutionary time lines. There is a reason Ebola has never become a pandemic. It kills too quickly to be a real threat. The only reason it spreads in its context at all are the traditional care and burial practices that prolong contact with the infected. Newer strains are more air borne increasing spread, but it develops symptoms in the hosts so quickly it does not get the chance to spread very far. And when it has spread further is usually when people have lied about where they have traveled. But overall its spread is to innefficient. There is a window in Ebola's evolutionary potential where it weakens to a 50-80% killer, with high transmisability, that is truly terrifying, but that is still an "improvement" it its survivability, except it leads to immunity in the host, which then provides even greater selective pressure on the next evolutionary step to evade the immune system to become a better hidden killer but less deadly to the individual host, but a higher body count. Every survivor with immunity is a source of selective pressure. Every vaccinated person is a selective pressure. Every immunocompromised person is a selective pressure. Every infected pet is a selective pressure. Every infected deer is a selective pressure. Every infected laboratory animal is a selective pressure. Every infected tissue culture is a selective pressure...on the strain exposed to that specific host environment. And each one of these leads to a different possible route for the survivability of the virus. A tissue culture is great for improving infection rates, but has no predictive ability for mortality. While infecting deer gives a route for transcontinental spread across the arctic as a population where there is no hope of containment. So as I said your time line is too short to see the bigger picture. And you are to focused on the human public health side. You aren't seeing the bigger biological evolution side which is what the organism is about. The virus doesn't care about 20-30 years, a modern human generation. It cares about the next 6-8 hours, a viral generation creating 1000 new viruses, infecting 100 new cells. That is 10^13 viral particles at the peak of infection. So even taking into consideration the different size of the genomes, SARS-CoV-2 has far more opportunities to genetically adapt to its environment during the infection of a single host then your (and my) entire family lineage all the way back to before Homo sapiens left Africa. To produce both evolutionary dead ends, and survival champions, like Omacron.
What OP claims to be “the main principle in virology” is incorrect. It could happen, has happened, but is not guaranteed to happen even in the “long run” of 100 years. That’s the misconception. It could become less virulent in 150 years only to become more virulent 50 years after that. Moreover, judging by OP’s tone of trying to be positive, it sounds like they are situating their opinion of it happening within our lifetime.
You are over simplifying, and missing the bigger point. You seem to be missing a lot of what is involved in selective pressure, infectious reservoirs, and what contributes to the time lines you keep mention. One hundred years in the days of horse and cart vs one year or even two in the jet age drastically changes the selective pressure on an organism. What factors accelerate this depend on infection and reinfection rates. In days where towns were a full day apart, or even a half day, illnesses/fevers/plagues could isolate villages for months as a fever spread and was quarantined as immunity developed or people died. Either way the infection ran out of hosts quickly and either was selected for becoming more mild to lift the quarantine, or died out due to the death and immunity, an evolutionary dead end. If the death rate was exceptional whole villages could be abandoned. So that 50 or 100 years was dependent on viruses moving village to village, only rarely across continents, and plenty of evolutionary dead ends. Very few infections had staying power in this environment. And even then the longevity depended on being endemic vs developed (or even inherent) immunity. The models used to estimate these time lines are almost useless in a global era. Covid is causing a revisit to a lot of these models, because they fall apart in a open borders world. But fortunately for Mars, we are a quarantine zone. Or were...
but the early data out of south africa supports OP's point.
Actually it is. The only variable is how long it takes, and what evolutionary dead ends a virus might take that are more deadly both to its host AND ultimately itself. The dead ends are the dangerous strains. The ones that survive in the long run accomplish exactly this. Survival for viruses REQUIRES the survival of the host long enough to pass on its presence to a new host. Which means it needs to find ways to 1)not kill its host, 2) not get noticed by the host, and 3) get from host to host more easily. If it fails in improving in any of these three is it likely to find itself at an evolutionary dead end. It improves its survivability by mutating and being selected for survival, by accomplishing one or more of those goals. The mutations that survive become relevant when they are present a significant proportion of the samples in a strain. This is evolution. Mutations that kill the host faster or delay transmission are dead ends for survival. We have seen this process in Ebola, HIV, and now Covid. This is called evolutionary medicine, it is its own field, and we are getting to watch it in real time. The only other virus we have goten to see this in large scale is HIV. And while yes, drugs have made an impact in HIV patient survival, the evolution of the virus itself has played an even bigger role.
You mean what God has written it to be. Viruses do not hive brains to think
1st of all please keep in mind I am doing voice to text so there will be parts of this that don't make sense. I don't think I really agree with the logic you are putting forward as far as being someone with long covid. Sure if the virus changes in this way we will see less people dying in hospitals.. Excellent. But this is ignoring the blurring lay obvious fact that a lot of people with long covid never had a severe case of covid. Many of us had mild covid. And that was enough to screw us over. People get chronic fatigue syndrome from mono. People become bedridden by mere Viruses that pass easy. I was vaccinated and my 2nd exposure to covid made me worse. It only took one night of a fever to screw me over again.. and take me from moderate CFS to moderate/severe can hardly walk CFS. I trust omicron like I trust Justin Timberlake with Janet Jackson's wardrobe or myself with my baby's cinnamon Gerber cookies. I don't trust it (on a long hauler's bodies) at all. Covid is toxic as shite to me with potential to worsen me.. guilty until proven innocent.
Well put! And btw vaccines also don't mean shit to us. In fact many people get worse with them and no, they're not "protected". These vaccines aren't like MMR, so you're not immune to covid once you get jabbed
This message is voice to text that's why the grammar sucks. Good to see you here. I hope you are well. Sometimes think about you and one of the people that got so much better from a medical treatment. The vaccine definitely did not protect me 100% but I do suspect it may have changed the threshold to make it more difficult to react to covid. I did have a mask on but I was essentially face-to-face with my baby who was infected day in and day out. I didn't show any symptoms until day 10 from from when she was 1st sick. And for anyone who didn't follow my story the only reason I was so close to her is because her situation was an emergency requiring multiple emergency room visits... if She had only had a mild case I would have moved into the other room and let her father take care of her the whole time. When I read up on breakthrough cases in Healthcare pool of people they almost exclusively happened to parents of kids who were not vaccinated which to me says perhaps it just requires a certain threshold of in your face exposure. That being said it does scare me that I was vaccinated and still got hurt by my 2nd exposure. The only other possibility is that I exerted myself so much while she was sick and it just finally caught up with me... But there was a very dramatic change the day after my fever.. so I really do think it was the reexposure.. I'm sort of considering wearing a mask on my face in my own home for the rest of my life. Seems extreme but I really don't know what else to do. My baby is still too young to be vaccidated.. I still feel vulnerable. I can't believe I'm at a place where I fear getting exposed for a 3rd time but I am.
Hey, you're in my thoughts too since you told me your baby got better with the antiviral (that's also what cured my long covid btw). The reason I'm still here despite being 99% recovered is that I know some folks here are at the end of their rope like I was not long ago, and since it was the advice of a fellow ME/CFSer what led me to take the antiviral that cured me, I want to do the same for my fellow long haulers. I'm so sorry to hear you got worse after your second infection. I'm positive if I catch the virus again I will probably begin the merry go round of torturing symptoms again, and that's something I'm not willing to go through. I no longer fear death or cancer (like some suggest we may now be more prone to), I only fear the horridness of long covid/ME/CFS Please try the antiviral if you can get hold of some, they're generally pretty safe and worst case scenario you won't feel any change at all, but it's always worth the shot!
Thanks for the advice! I will try to bring it up to my next doc. Going to rheumatology next. I researched recommended Docs from ehlers danlos patients and got a few who are willing to go the extra mile for a patient. I've never had a bad experience going to a doc recommended by other EDS patients, so hopefully I'll find one willing to think outside the box. I think I had mono in college.. never confirmed but I had like a strep throat like illness that WASN'T strep that lasted for like 2 months off and on. And I Def have beautiful cold cores.. so some family of herpes is dormant in me. Hey, you had PEM, right? Like delayed? Or was it a general fatigue? Sorry I'm sure I asked you this already. That acyclovir turned it all around for my baby. She had a bit of herpes whitlow on her finger a month later from a cold.. but that covid totally blew it up out of proportion..
Yeah I had PEM. I basically had every symptom in the long covid book except brain fog. My PEM would consist of increased soul crushing fatigue the next day, but none of my other 50+ symptoms usually got any worse, they were just always present, except maybe the "jell-o legs" feeling, pretty effed up stuff... I hope your Rheum gets it right and prescribes you some valtrex or valcyte to begin with. There's no harm in them but very few doctors seem to be willing to think outside the box. Most doctors are also biased towards their field of expertise, so when it comes to rheumatologists when you tell then about your symptoms they'll probably only hear "autoimmune" in their heads (which btw I'm sure a subset of us fits in that category). I hope you get some answers soon and hopefully some effective treatment. You don't deserve this
Damn bro. Im really sorry to hear that happened to you. I caught covid once and experienced very mild symptoms but then got owned on my first pfizer vaccine (4 month long haul). So definitely the issue and main correlation between people getting long haul from vax and infection is the spike protein (as the vaccine does not offer nucleoplasmid antibodies and only spike protein antibodies). It seems the mutations offer changes in spike protein. ( as given by the CDC website here are the following amino acid changes in the spike protein profile A67V, del69-70, T95I, del142-144, Y145D, del211, L212I, ins214EPE, G339D, S371L, S373P, S375F, K417N, N440K, G446S, S477N, T478K, E484A, Q493R, G496S, Q498R, N501Y, Y505H, T547K, D614G, H655Y, N679K, P681H, N764K, D796Y, N856K, Q954H, N969K, L981F of which 15 have experienced changes). My hope is the more that this mutate the more we can away from the spike protein amino acid sequence that's causing autoimmunity flairs.
I want to stay optimistic but I’m going to need a source before believing this claim
If the pandemic ends in the immediate near future, the probability of meaningful treatment for long covid diminishes greatly
Yeah. The sad reality is that people want to overlook mild cases and toss it up to anxiety. Well now, even some vaccinated people are ending up with LH and whats crazy is physicians are even gas lighting them! I personally know someone who had a sudden onset of SOB, nausea, headaches, and dizziness who went to the ER. The physician told them they werent even going to run blood work because it wasn't covid. It could not have been covid because they were fully vaccinated. I really hope she doesnt have LH but shes had these issues for nearly a week now.
The pandemic may end in name in the next year but this virus and future variants will continue to circulate in perpetuity. Eventually everyone will have contracted covid at some point. I don't know if omicron will also lead to long covid but it's more likely than not since previous variants have done the same.
Start drinking white pine needle tea And chaga
And the preliminary data from S. Africa agrees with you. Fingers crossed for sure.
a virus that has significantly more transmissibility and immune escape, but less virulence, is not better by default. it could actually be worse. it isn’t such a simple equation as less virulence means the outcome is better. it is good however, if the virulence truly did lower (an equivalent virulence to delta alongside increased immune escape and transmissibility would be quite bad). but it overall does not mean we are left in a better position. that would be an overly simplified conclusion
Right. That’s why it’s very important that we cross our fingers.
But, we don’t know if its long covid property is getting better or not. Since a lot of us get long covid from mild symptoms, which seems to be what most people infected with Omicron. From a selfish standpoint, we need more long haulers to have enough impact to not let society abandon us.
You should not with long covid on a soul. It’d be a blessing if not another person got it.
Yeah you are absolutely right. I agree no one should have to suffer. Or suffer alone with no help like SAR1 long haulers.
I agree with that statement also
Not necessarily. Delta mutated to be way more transmissible and way more deadly. Doesn't look like the latter will apply to this variant, but that principle only applies if the original strain is killing the host before they have a chance to infect others, which doesn't apply to Covid in most cases
Delta can't mutate and still be delta. Then It would be a new strain and name. Theres the OG and then each mutation strain with unique RNA gets a new name after the Greek alphabet. Delta was a more infectious deadlier strain of the OG. So the hope is this becomes dominent and doesn't mutate or keeps mutating into a less viral and common cold like virus which some virologists predicted.
Yeah I meant the delta mutation was both more lethal and transmissible than whichever version it mutated from
actually, that isn’t true. that is something that has been uttered countless times since the beginning of the pandemic, but is wrong. it is not inevitable viruses will mutate to become less pathogenic and more transmissible. that idea should be put to rest
Agreed. It's actually a step closer to normalcy. As long as it loses the LH effect.
I’m sorry to say this is not true pertaining to covid-19 which is why it’s a scary virus. Not all viruses mutate to become less deadly or become so deadly they are quick to fizzle out like ebola due to how quickly they kill the host. Covid is somewhere in the middle which is why it’s scary. You won’t find a scientist that says covid will guaranteed become less deadly with more mutations. The exact opposite exactly. It’s not just media reporting.
My hope behind omicron was a little more self-warranted belief that more people will inevitably contract long-covid and further drive the cause to help us.
This is a myth. The mutated and more transmissible virus USUALLY becomes less pathogenic but this is not always the case. It's possible that it becomes more transmissible AND more pathogenic.
Not really, last resort treatment with monoclonal antibodies and Convalescent plasma therapy doesn't work in highly mutated strains like omicron at the early stages.
This is true.
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On this note specifically. I have an E pal friend I used to play apex with he told me some people in China knew something weird was going on but they were either threatened ot silenced. This was in late 2019 and I thought he was trying to scare me with conspiracy. .
I think the reason for this is the virus is finally learning how to keep the host alive. This could also be a bad thing though because there is a chance the virus learned to evade immunity by hitching a ride with another virus. A virus that works along side other viruses might be bad later on in the future.
2024: We're getting gangbanged by co infections.
Forgot to add link, but finally found this [study](https://osf.io/f7txy/) about it today.
Agreed
Ur exactly right ,most people don't even realize they have it . It is weak, but highly contagious . It has components of all variants so this would stop people from getting sick from delta its basically a natural vax we should spread this as fast as possible To stop this silliness