In other words, it’s becoming a regular coronavirus instead of a novel coronavirus.
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Yeah just a question of timescale, at least one paper published in the last two weeks speculated this was possibly a decades long process rather than years long process. Hopefully that was too conservative.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741.long
Edit: probably should say possibly, sort of a material typo there
Arent we overthinking Iceland?
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Its high 1st dose vaccination. But something like 50% second dose.
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You then have all the under 18s unvaccinated.
Like. Corona spreading in these circumstances doesnt tell us anything new. Surely?
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It’s also an extremely homogenous population of 400k people - which could come into play.
Welp, my kid’s daycare is closed for a whole five days. I guess there are a ton of kids out sick, and a teacher who was floating between classes tested positive.
And so it begins (continues)…
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I misread the information actually - I thought two dose rate was 90% for adults. Spreading in a country with 71% fully vaccinated (which is the actual figure) is not even close to surprising.
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If there is one thing I learned at 2+2 Politics circa 2007, it’s that poker players love libertartian ideas. It should come as absolutely no surprise that anti vaxxer / anti government narratives have a lot of traction among poker enthusiasts.
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Eh, that’s a bit too optimistic. Regular coronavirus doesn’t kill the immunocompromised and send some percentage of the vaxxed and not immunocompromised (however small) to the hospital and/or ICU. Regular coronavirus causes a cold.
isn’t that basically how it happens though? we go through enough infection cycles and it just keeps becoming less lethal until it basically becomes the common cold.
vaccines just jumpstarted our progress into the cycle considerably.
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The problem is that before it gets weaker it gets stronger. Plus this thing has a clear “latent” period in terms of disease. Folks are contagious days before they develop symptoms and many don’t develop symptoms at all. For now the evolutionary pressure is pushing up viral titers which is correlated with both higher infectivity and a wider disease causing population (healthier and younger).
Pressure to attenuate comes when the disease causation is so quick and severe that it interferes with infecting others.
It is reasonable to assume that amongst children there is plenty of room for further evolution in the bad direction.
In many ways it is opposite of the 1918 flu. (Tho there may have been a weak spring 1918 wave followed by a the more severe fall wave).
Eh. I’ve seen some research that it’s not really the viruses that mutate to become less lethal so much as it’s humans who mutate to not die from it as much. I don’t know, I think we’re getting pretty close to definitively settling the “is this worse then the 1918 flu” with a “yes, yes its definitely worse.” Our science and medicine is much better then in 1918 but this bug is worse.
Also, today’s US numbers are really really bad. Some of that is due to weekend choppy reporting especially from states like Florida, but NYtimes tracker reports 237,000 new cases. Florida has been playing chicken so far and gotten really lucky with not having hospital overruns, but honestly I don’t see how Florida avoids Italy-style hospital overruns with this wave.
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Technical point, but the people aren’t mutating. Their immune systems are just being activated.
As far as your point, I don’t know which dominates. Covid does seem to be different than most past viruses with a infectious period significantly separate from morbidity.
But some of them have turned into lizards.
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Yeah, I spoke inartfully. I meant more that people who are going to die die. The ones who are able to fight it off survive. Over generations it no longer impacts people as seriously because all the ones who have whatever genes that cause it to be serious have died whereas all the ones who have the genes to fight it off survive. It’s umm…. Not a good thing obviously.
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Right, but that’s only because your immune response has seen stuff like it before. Regular coronaviruses would also send people to the ICU if we weren’t used to them.
At any rate, looks like there’s something goofy about the Iceland data, so I’m not going to read too much into it.
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I posted this before, but it’s worth reading on this point. The upshot is that the human immune system is set up to run in super high gear against novel pathogens without relying on acquired immunity (because kids haven’t acquired much immunity yet). That’s not a perfect solution, sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes having your immune system lose its shit over any random germ it sees is not a good thing. My daughter caught a cold the weekend before last and had a fucking febrile seizure because her temperature went up too fast for her brain to handle. (Apparently this is a completely fine and normal thing despite being unspeakably terrifying, so that’s good to know at least.) As you get older, the part of your immune system that doesn’t rely on antibodies chills out a bit and lets the memory cells do more of the work. That’s fine if you encountered all the pathogens in your environment as a child, but can be a big problem if you encounter something completely new.
As an example, the reason people had chickenpox parties before there was a vaccine was that getting to adulthood without acquiring chickenpox immunity is potentially dangerous. There’s also a theory that a virus that is currently a variant of the common cold actually killed like a million people in the late 19th century when it crossed over into humans because adults had never seen it before. But this is not people evolving to deal with the virus, it’s the immune system learning how to deal with it as part of the environment. (And there’s no particular reason to believe that it’s genetic susceptibility that controls who dies when a new virus emerges–could be environmental factors, opportunistic infections, just plain bad luck, etc.) In a way, COVID is sort of like those terrible chain emails that older folks love. They didn’t get the natural obsession with dumb internet bullshit out of their systems by reading about ninjas when they were 7, so they’re vulnerable to getting into it later on when it’s a bigger issue.
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This. Know someone who caught covid in Vegas likely playing live at Aria, started feeling lousy but had a vacation planned to the Ozarks and went, traveling party all got it (all the unvaxxed, one vaxxed mild symptoms and one didn’t get it).
Getting and spreading it just isn’t even on the radar of thought for huge swaths of the country. It’s hard for people like us to imagine that since we follow it so closely, but much like politics, so many people just do not care.
