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OT: Coronavirus Resources - and other things to not worry about

His theory is based on immunity and frequent exposure through a variety of variants, making your immune system broader and more robust with time. He's not saying it'll mutate into a cold because it's rare or something.

If this is what you were saying then I completely agree with you. The x-factor is how robust can our immune systems get? How much more can we defang the virus? He's hoping it becomes similar to the cold but it could still be flu-like or even worse. That's largely unknown and the reason the evolutionary biologist stepped in to disagree.
 
Weird that the Virology PHD expert guy would agree precisely with what poor uneducated dumb zeke thinks.
 
He said nothing about the virus mutating into anything because covid is rare so that makes it more likely that it mutates into the sniffles or whatever the argument is. No actual expert has ever said that haha. That's ridiculous. His thread was about immune responses over time. Read again. Closer.


And if this is what you were trying to convey this entire time, then the last 9 pages were a waste of time. Because this is obviously true and we're already seeing a defanged virus with time because of our immunity.
 
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www.nature.com

Beyond Omicron: what’s next for COVID’s viral evolution

The rapid spread of new variants offers clues to how SARS-CoV-2 is adapting and how the pandemic will play out over the next several months.
www.nature.com www.nature.com

Scientists are searching for ways to predict the virus’s next moves, looking to other pathogens for clues. They are tracking the effects of the mutations in the variants that have arisen so far, while watching out for new ones. They expect SARS-CoV-2 eventually to evolve more predictably and become like other respiratory viruses — but when this shift will occur, and which infection it might resemble is not clear.
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Otto sees the virus’s evolution as like walking in a landscape, where higher elevations equate to improved transmissibility. The way she sees it, when SARS-CoV-2 began spreading in humans it seemed to be on a ‘fitness plateau’ surrounded by a landscape of many possible evolutionary outcomes. In any given infection, there were probably thousands of viral particles each with unique single-letter mutations, but Otto suspects that few, if any, of these made the virus more infectious. Most changes probably reduced transmissibility.

“If the virus entered at a reasonably high point, any one-step mutation would take it downhill,” Otto says. Summiting higher peaks required the combinations of several mutations to make more-significant gains in its ability to spread.
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Evolving to evade immune responses such as antibodies could also carry some evolutionary costs. A spike mutation that dodges antibodies might reduce the virus’s ability to recognize and bind to host cells. The receptor-binding region of spike — the major target for neutralizing antibodies — is relatively small, says Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and the region might be able to tolerate only so much change and still perform its main job of attaching itself to host cells’ ACE2 receptors.
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Expert Zeke.
 
zeke said:
West Nile has been around for 85 years that we know of. Influenza for hundreds. Influenza actually refers to a whole whack of different viruses. sometimes mutations are just variants and sometimes they're different enough to be new viruses altogether.

They are constantly mutating and occasionally a mutation has popped up that was particularly well suited to killing humans. 99% of those mutations are not particularly deadly to humans tho.

Covid-19 is a one beast of a mutation. The best human-killer we've seen in at least a century. And it will likely linger for a good while.

But you are already looking at the most perfectly suited human-killing viral mutation in at least a century.

Could it mutate into something worse? For sure it could. But the likelihood of it continuing to both mutate enough stay ahead of our immune responses (especially with the help of vaccines) AND not mutate away from its currently awesome human-killing sweet spot is not great.

It wasn't easy for Covid to get to earn the top seed.
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the fact that we've already had waves from four different variants seems to undercut your main argument though
 
Literally no one disagrees with any of that. It's saying something different than you think it does. You're interpreting things how you want to interpret them. No one has said that the virus is likely to become less deadly because covid is so rare and something something. No one. Because it's obviously nonsense.
 
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Stinky said:
There's a certain perpetually terrified percentage of Nova scotia's population that will just go get tests all the time for any reason.
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it may have something to do with our Premier and Chief Medical Officer of Health repeatedly stressing that asymptomatic testing was crucial to contain and control the virus.
 
zeke said:
And more importantly, zekepoints.
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I think the fundamental disconnect is somewhere you have decided upon the scenario that you think is most likely but I have not seen actual scientific support that the likelihood is what you seem to think.

as in, sure, what you think is going to happen may happen. however, it may not (prestopoint). and this guy has not seen any evidence yet suggesting that zekepoint is more likely than prestopoint.

I mean (and I expect to regret saying this), I do hope you are right. I'm just not convinced based on your zeketheory in this thread so far.
 
The current seven-day daily average of cases is up 60% over the previous week to about 240,400 per day, she said. The average daily hospitalization rate for the same period is up 14% to about 9,000 per day and deaths are down about 7% at 1,100 per day, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters at a White House briefing.
 
deaths lag infections anyways, which you know.

and death rates declining does not automatically mean decreased severity/virulence, which you also know.
 
but I mean I certainly agree with the idea that we need some good news and it would be fantastic if we could confidently provide some
 
Wayward DP said:
I think the fundamental disconnect is somewhere you have decided upon the scenario that you think is most likely but I have not seen actual scientific support that the likelihood is what you seem to think.

as in, sure, what you think is going to happen may happen. however, it may not (prestopoint). and this guy has not seen any evidence yet suggesting that zekepoint is more likely than prestopoint.

I mean (and I expect to regret saying this), I do hope you are right. I'm just not convinced based on your zeketheory in this thread so far.
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You have let Presto's defensiveness make you think I was arguing something I wasn't.
 
Wayward DP said:
but I mean I certainly agree with the idea that we need some good news and it would be fantastic if we could confidently provide some
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Immune systems becoming broader and more robust over time provides greater gains than any decrease in severity anyway (which is unlikely to ever be drastically more or less severe with time if we base this on our priors). Some folks are too focused on intrinsic severity and don't give enough credit to the incredible power of immune systems (remember what this disease did to people in 2020 when it was intrinsically milder?). Take that as the good news.
 
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