I’m taking the actual number with a grain of salt, but any move towards more immune evasion or if omicron reinfection start happening in a short time period obviously very problematic.
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Covid may not become less severe over time - scientist
Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, says it’s not certain Covid will become less severe over time.
The professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London tells BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that after many discussions the group has “no way of concluding that viruses have to become less severe over time.”
He says the next Covid variant “could be more severe” adding “there’s no rule about this.”
Openshaw also says reinfections - where somebody tests positive again after a previous bout of Covid - are increasing and warns “we still have to take this disease very, very seriously".
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Old news itt. It’s selected for based on transmission. Diseases is just a side effect. Even more so with this thing that seems to transmit through everyday breathing and talking, as opposed to coughing or other secretions.
Now up the lethality too much and it will have a impetus to lessen. After a whole bunch of bodies pile up.
I talked about this before, but this seems backwards to me. If you can spread without symptoms, then symptoms limit your ability to spread by inducing your host to get tested and isolate.
I’m willing to believe that those aren’t easily separable (i.e., reproducing as fast as possible is good for the virus and inherently causes symptoms and severe illness), but I don’t see how a variant that is able to spread but never causes symptoms isn’t more fit than one that spreads as easily but causes symptoms quickly.
Symptoms like coughing go a long way toward increasing the transmissibility.
In most diseases, significant symptoms are required to spread (coughing, sneezing, diarrhea). Symptoms=diseases. It’s either directly the infection or the disease using the bodies response to get out in the environment. Also their is a lag between transmission in and transmission out.
When symptoms are extreme, people are sick in bed and have limited contacts.
Not true for coronavirus. Symptoms are not primary means of transmission. Actual behavior is showing many (most?) people will go out of their way to not avoid other people. Also the interval between transmission in and out seems to be pretty short.
Let’s go covid! Let’s go!
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Might rename it the Sarah Palin Award
Bitch is partly why we got Trump
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You still call women that?
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Not the thread for it, I suppose, but what is “the Sarah Palin/NYT trial”?
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NYT opinion piece said the Gabby Giffords shooter was directly inspired by a Palin advertisement. Wasn’t true, and I think they said the ad itself was something it was not. She sued for libel, under current precedent she needs to show they knew they were lying and there was malice. She’s said that if she loses she’ll appeal to have the standard for libel against public figures be changed.
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its pretty clear (from emails that came out in discovery) that the NY times did not commit libel under the current standard
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mildness hasn’t been fully determined yet, and the whole evolutionary pressure line of thought is much more optimistic than warranted. waves can seem milder because of acquired immunities (both infection and vaccine) and nearly universal exposure. but in principle new variants can be more severe than OG in the sense if they had broken out as wave 1, they would have killed more people. but they are are milder as waves 4 or 5.
starting year 3 of covid, all trends are still going to have wide variance. and numerically we’ll be comparing everything to OG strain and delta, which is super noisy. but i think we are inching towards an eventual periodic vaccine, just a matter of how many years between shots. if we are talking about one year boosters, another wave of antivax sentiment is going to appear. but if current vax can prevent hospitalization for say even just 3 years, advances in vax will mean next shot will be likely create more lasting benefit.
Unfortunate FYP I think. I do agree that anti-vaxx sentiment is only going to get worse.
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Completely agree on the hard to know the relative morbidity due to the factors you listed. My point was more just accepting Omicron is “less” but it really doesn’t matter. All strains to date are low compared to 1918 flu, SARS, etc and thus not under any real selective pressure to get less nasty. Shit that kills quickly tends to burn out transmission chains.
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#KarenKonvoy is currently trending.
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We like to mock America but we have no shortage of morons in Canada too.
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We take pride in being stupid, but not THAT stupid.
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