Patrick O.
There is never a guarantee. But those scientist dont seem to get the point. If i will get an infection anyway, maybe better from Omicron in combination with a vaccine than with a more deadly one. To me it seems like fear mongering.GETTING IT NOW ISN'T GOING TO STOP YOU FROM GETTING IT AGAIN LATER :screm-a: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Edit: it has been two years and people still don't understand basic things like "don't count on natural immunity".
It just occurred to me that some parents somewhere are probably having chickenpox parties for covid
That was 100% a thing during the beginning of it all, probably still is
Chickenpox vaccines have existed since the 1970s, so chickenpox parties themselves are also ridiculous.
Aah, those scientists that work their whole life in this field are fear-mongering for shite decision the US and it co took. Remind me of a quote : "For some reason, everyone is an immunologist now".
Yes because "it" is two different things. Two different variants
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You can get reinfected with the same variant. We have seen immunity fade over time, both natural and from vaccines.
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That makes him even more wrong.
You can get reinfected with the same variant. We have seen immunity fade over time, both natural and from vaccines.
Do you know any where i can read more about this?
From what I have seen previous infection is extremely effective at preventing reinfection
They found that reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 in people who had not received a vaccine could occur as soon as 3 months after initial infection, with a median risk of reinfection within 16 months, under endemic conditions.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/coronavirus-reinfection-how-long-might-natural-immunity-last#Analyzing-the-data
One example, but the even bigger issue is that those future variants he's talking about in his comment could just bypass this immunity completely.
That's just for the unvaccinated and with a median risk of 16 months that's pretty long.
For the vaccinated i don't think reinfection should be much of a concern. I agree that the real danger is the emergence of new variants
A median risk means half the people will fall below it - the point I'm making is reinfection can occur and even if Omicron became endemic, the commenter should be expecting to catching it approximately every 1.5 years for the rest of his life. Considering the risk of complications and possible long-term effects, that would be catastrophic on a population-level.
None of this matters because new variants are guaranteed and, as you point out, that's a larger risk of escaping immunity. Any idea people have of "natural immunity" helping with this pandemic is and has always been pure cope.
The funniest part is his comment is specifically about catching Omicron instead of a potentially more deadly variant, which Omicron probably wouldn't make you immune to and you would still catch.
Isn't there a possibility that Omicron spreads through the population that it burns itself out? Wouldn't this decrease the risk of a new worse varient emerging?
It's the opposite - the more it spreads, the higher the chance of variants forming. The article in OP touches on this, plus the possibility of variants forming in animal populations.
It's clear we need effective strategies to deal with these kinds of pandemics (like China), and that the "let it spread and hope" method the west is adopting is going to kill a lot of people and make things worse.
I agree totally about china showing the correct way forward.
However I'm hesitant to buy into all the latest covid doomerism. The idea that a new and more contagious and more deadly and vaccine escaping variant seems not certain to me
Nothing is certain, of course. However, it's generally not productive to assume the best case, because you end up with the American response instead of the Chinese one. In the case of a global pandemic, I prefer to stay on the safe side.
The article in OP touches on variants, and it indicates there's no reason to expect it to go away after Omicron, which many seem to.
The possibility of more deadly variants occurring and spreading is always there - as far as I understand, the idea that viruses generally get less deadly is true, historically, but over much longer timelines than what we're talking about.
The possibility of more deadly variants occurring and spreading is always there
This is true of all other viruses also, no? This doesn't seem convincing that we need to be so worried about this possibility with COVID
I'm in full support of being prepared for the worst but there does seem to be a strain of doomerism out there that doesn't just want to prepare for the worst but also to insist that the worst is certain.
This coronavirus seems uniquely adaptive because of the incredibly high viral loads that are found in both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Every copy of the virus carries the risk of a new, more dangerous variant.
Other viruses are not currently or historically infecting millions of hosts every day. When there's a million people infected every day the chance of a worse variant is a million times higher than if there was 1 case a day.
Hello friend!
It's not just that variants must emerge but they must out compete all other variants and have immune escape. What are the chances that a more deadly and more contagious and immune escaping variant emerges?
If viruses are always under evolutionary pressure to evolve to be worse, why don't we have constant emerging of new, more deadly, immune/vaccine escaping variants for all other viruses?
Sure, but they're rarely more deadly. And not always immune escaping. And they never seem to get more contagious
Look up above in the thread. Another poster shared a link about the median immunity being 16 months for the unvaxxed. Idk how or if that changes for a vaccinated individual
Isn't that the most likely future for COVID? Don't get me wrong i think that would still be horrible but it would be manageable like the flu.
The hoopla about there being a new worse variant seems like simple doomerism to me
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There should be an update to that Pandemic game that readjusts the way the world reacts to the player's disease based on what we have seen from the spread of covid.
Or someone should make an entirely new one.
Fair point lol
Instead of being mad at Greenland everyone would be mad at China
I feel like their reaction is basically Madagascar . Except they represent a much larger proportion of the global population and the potential spread.
This is why starting in South Africa is actually a pretty good strat, it guarantees infection of Madagascar and the UK, and getting the UK is usually good enough to get Greenland.
On plauge Inc there is a antivaxxer mode, where the people don't take the cure and protest against it, and don't practice basic hygiene like washing hands, etc
They should make a mode called Containment and the thing people and trying to stop the spread of is communism and it’s your job for the infectious ideas of class consciousness to spread amongst the people
So in order to win the game the player would have to become a fascist and literally exterminate all the reds?
And it still wouldn't stop more reds from occurring because of the material contradictions. It would just be a temporary victory.
No the point of Plague Inc is to infect everyone. If you’re playing as communism, the end game is global communism. Although I’m not sure if the “misinformation” mode also involves killing all humans
They have had sneezing/spitting contests in red state bars during the pandemic.
They actually did exactly that. I heard an interview with the creators on NPR or something.
They always could be ignored. I'm astonished at how everyone around me forgot all common sense and uncritically embraced a platitude that's quite absurd on its face: where's the less lethal HIV? Where's the less lethal smallpox and measles, the less lethal polio? The safe number of cases for those viral diseases was deemed to be zero and in a time before all institutions had been neutered by neoliberalism they turned from endemic to eradicated in a coordinated international effort.
You see, they were right after all. Only 0.5% paralysed people. Mild, if you ask me :biden-troll:.
I think there's evidence HIV is becoming less deadly, but only slightly. I've said this before but we're looking at decades timescales for any real drop in severity.
Yes. Best case scenario is the virus doesn't mutate too much and less people are hospitalized and die in the next wave. If less people are hospitalized and die in the next wave, even if it's 80% of what we are seeing now and hospitals and services are crippled again, they will declare their strategy a success.
In a hundred years time, we'll have a new plague and people will justify not doing anything about it because "Common covid kills more people annually".
They also believe those propaganda articles that say "China is defeating covid but at what cost?", so they'll believe that China is actually in a worse position
Good luck with this tact. In my experience, westerners are more resistant to this line of argument than almost anything I have ever tried to argue
First stage of denial is saying the numbers are fake
Second stage of denial is saying China can only lockdown efficiently because they’re a red fash dictatorship filled with sheeple ants
Third stage is just combining those two as your neurons undergo cell death from the cognitive dissonance
They do, but it's just on average and can be something that happens on the order of decades.
They essentially take a biased random walk, with that bias being towards less severe immune response, itself responsible for most of the impacts of disease.
They don't always. HIV is one of the most rapidly mutating virus in history and has not become less virulent.
That's true, though HIV is a bit special in its relationship with the immune system and how it causes disease. It does have some direct and serious symptoms related to inflammation, which is the classic way in which diseases cause damage, but the major impact of HIV on people's bodies and its deadlines is in destroying the immune system itself, namely T cells. This means that the "usual" selective pressures are much weaker and could even be the opposite when it comes to AIDS.
I should note that I don't know the evolutionary history of HIV's health impacts outside of destroying the immune system. For example, it causes brain inflammation and has impacts on cognition, but I have no idea if that has gotten worse, better, or stayed the same over time.
Thanks for pointing this out, though! It's a very good thing to keep in mind. The specifics of the disease really do matter, as do timelines, and the trend with SARS-CoV-2 doesn't make me optimistic about timelines.
Yeah SARS-CoV-2 is a slow mutating virus because it codes for its own replication proteins and therefore has an error-checking protein for its genome called NSP14. That's also why the virus is resistant to traditional nucleoside analog based antiviral drugs. To my knowledge, all coronaviruses are like that.
The idea that viruses evolve to reach equilibrium with the host is only really true in the most literal sense. As in, a virus that wipes out 100% of the population will cease to exist because there will be no more hosts. There really isn't that much evolutionary pressure because it really doesn't kill that many people relative to the number of infected.
The idea that as long as we keep feeding the virus, it will eventually go away is not really scientific.
The "law of declining virulence" was written by Theobald Smith in the 1800s. Here is a mildly informative article about it from the other day: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-virulent/story?id=82052581
The necessity of disease eradication is pretty modern. Historically, If a new virus came out and killed an entire village it would stop there just because there was no plane to get on. Small pox also had to be eradicated, it never lost its virulence. Rabies hasn't, neither has measles or polio.
If the same mutation causes more people to die but also causes faster spread, that mutation will dominate. It's basically hoping for a happy coincidence. I hope for these types of coincidences but they're not inevitable and it could just as easily get worse.
I think the best way to communicate what I mean is that I'm describing trade-off theory, which is mainstream science taught in universities everywhere, and not avirulence theory, which is that 1800s theory. I scrounged around trying to find a good explanation from a university course but nothing very good popped up. This review in Cell from 2017 is pretty good: http://hedricklab.ucsd.edu/documents/Hedrick-CellReviews-2017.pdf
There are more detailed examples and explanations that elaborate on the mechanisms of decreased severity. For example, secific immune responses are often what cause the most recognized damage (this is true of SARS-CoV-2) and the same mechanisms that improve transmissibility are often about preventing those exact responses, making the virus both less severe and more transmittable. So long as those strains compete for hosts, the trend will hold. Luckily, the spike protein seems pretty specific for ACE2 and it's the major place where competition would evolve away.
With that in mind, it's very important to emphasize that this is still a random walk, that it happens on evolutionary time, and that the pathogen has more space to explore transmissibility when it's just jumped from a zoonotic host, so (1) things can get worse before they get better, (2) things can get better and then get bad again, and (3) it could take years, decades for this trend to matter.
One thing that I should probably focus on more is why we're even talking about this. It's not because we're all suddenly interested in pathogen-host evolutionary ecology! It's because the capitalist ruling class has prevented an actual eradication or even control response, so this is their propagandized copium: maybe the virus will fix itself. And people latch onto it because they know help isn't coming and they want the pandemic to be over, they want to be safe, they want to return to some level of normalcy. These are false hopes over the timeframes they're hoping for given the trajectories of SARS-CoV-2 variants. We should be pushing back on this within and through our socialist parties.
Nothing says they have to. As long as a virus can infect new hosts quickly and efficiently there's no problem if it kills the one it's currently in.
They don't have to, but there's nearly always a selective pressure to because of the coupling between immune escape and not causing horrible symptoms, which are themselves usually the immune system's response. Example: COVID doesn't kill the lungs through the virus itself screwing them up, but because it infected them rapidly and invokes an immune response there, creating inflammation and scar tissue from associated damage.
The reason it's a random walk is exactly what you're saying, though. A more severe variant can take over so long as it's better at spreading, which isn't solely a function of avoiding immune response, and hasn't exhausted its hosts. The last two variants that took over produce way higher viral loads and are still quite severe, for example.
A virus can also get less severe for a while, then get displaced by a more severe variant. Imagine, for example, if the next dominant variant were noticeably less severe and didn't cause permanent lung damage. Libs would declare victory (they're already trying to with omicron copium), but the next variant after that to take over could be more virulent simply because everyone is now more immune to the less severe one and not our huge backlog of shitty variants (let alone new ones).
And this stuff can take a very long time.
Just wanna stress that this is a real tendency in diseases and widely recognized in microbiology and people who study the evolution of infectious diseases but also it's a really bad excuse for thinking things will be fine on any acceptable timelinr. That excuse is also copium spread by a ruling class that is running the people through a COVID meat grinder and the people themselves who see that help is not coming and find this idea appealing.
It's actually good because only the weak will die and this will be good for society because thanos :so-true:
The way the US and it allies on the West let the virus bounce around and breed, maybe.
This whole time the fucking goblins in charge of western economies have said “deaths matter not cases”. Then we got Delta, then Omicron, and soon we’re going to get much worse because they refuse to treat increasing cases like the huge problem it is. As we get more cases we’re gonna get more and more variants until it’s just around forever like the flu :agony-deep:
Expect more worrisome Covid-19 variants after Omicron: scientists
The new strains are scientists?
cmon man, im trying so hard to not become doomer. Im so tired of things getting worse
This is a no brainier to anyone with a passing knowledge of evolution but I'm still pleasantly surprised that they're reporting on it
On the one hand, yes, we're all going to die. On the other hand, our deaths will forever stand testament to the superiority of socialism over capitalism.
