The important part is that neither of those became lesser by evolution, but by medical progress. Waiting for this to be less dangerous is just not gonna happen. To quote a certain Martian, we need to “science the shit out if this.”
20 Likes
9 Likes
We have very clearly decided to let it rage no matter what, so I think my point holds.
5 Likes
A virus that killed 50% of its hosts would provoke a completely different public health response from one that kills 1% of its hosts
2 Likes
That would be Ebola no?
1 Like
The good bit is: coronaviruses aren’t like the flu, and possibly will never be. Influenza shows antigenic drift in a way coronaviruses can not, as far as I understood Christian Drosten.
5 Likes
4 Likes
Kind of a negative selection bias here. If a strain evolves into something harmless how would we ever know?
How would we know? Because harmless organisms would still show up in your regular lab tests.
3 Likes
My routine lab tests only look for what the doctor is looking for based on my symptoms and my current heart disease.
I don’t remember a result for harmless organisms.
Now, if they continue to test for covid even after or if it becomes just another harmless virus they may see what it’s up to but I imagine the testing will stop as soon as covid stops being a threat to our health care system.
They don’t routinely test for the flu unless your doctor or hospital asks for a test.
None of what I said means I’m against testing, I just wonder how they track harmless stuff or if they even need to.
1 Like
While the doctor may order a specific test the lab will usually run a battery of tests on the same same on the streamlab. They need to know what the background flora is so they can discount the results it may give.
For your flu example the hospital/lab would just run a URI panel that tests for a half-dozen things. This is how the hospitals knew there was very little flu last year even though they were looking for COVID.
My wife runs these tests at the local hospital. She’s the expert so I’m just regurgitating what little I’ve picked up from her
8 Likes
Because I am not looking for them. Modern Lab test are not randomly looking for whatever viruses are in there, they specifically look for DNA/RNA sequences of known pathogens. And if a person has no pathogens they have no symptoms so nobody would be testing them anyways.
We carry quite a thousands of viruses and bacteria with us that do us no (known…) harm and so nobody is looking for them.
1 Like
I did not know that, if I can remember I’m going to ask my doctor how it all works.
Learn something new everyday.
1 Like
A few million travelers get tested monthly regardless of symptoms or not.
6 Likes
As far as I understand it that’s the way it works. Flu you also have the multiple species, and they mutate much faster in general.
Like we’ve only got a couple dozen COVID variants and mutations we need to track. Apparently with the flu that’s your starting point, and there can be hundreds of full on strains in any given season to deal with.
Which is your additional good bit.
Because coronaviruses don’t have that much antigenic drift going on, and how we targeted the vaccines. Everyone who’s vaccinated is completely protected against SARS-1 and MERS.
We’ve all basically been getting a universal SARS vaccine this whole time.
So for one. With your routine cardiac tests, they’re not routinely checking the genetic make up of whatever they’re testing.
For another the testing and tracking of strains here started with the initial SARS outbreak and never really stopped. Though funding and focus on the program was cut, not too long before COVID cropped up.
But building on the model of international efforts around the flu, in the 00’s in response to SARs and Swine Flu epidemics. We built this whole international tracking and research effort around potential pandemic strains and new diseases.
We were banking and recording both strains of MERS and SARS, and even newly discovered related Coronaviruses in animals. So even though we didn’t catch COVID through that, we had a big ole database with some very closely related stuff in it. That let us move as fast as we did on vaccines, testing, and figuring out where it came from.
Even to the point of having prep work for potential vaccines done.
I mean it could have gone faster, if we hadn’t cut funding for it.
But that doesn’t stop even if/when this pandemic ends.
Your PCR test is basically a genetic test on the virus in your system, we match that against known diagnostic bits of the COVID genome. And identify the strain by looking for identifying mutations.
That can just get databased, compared to the rest. Samples can go for more intense genetic testing. Any post pandemic cases will go through the same, and we’ll still be poking “wild” viruses with a stick and sampling populations to see if it’s running around. Clinical testing might not be routine if cases of COVID aren’t routine. But we were already doing this stuff as routine research before COVID.
Hopefully we’ll do more of this. Since even with the guts cut out it it’s proved to be insanely important.
4 Likes
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00155-x
In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.
7 Likes
More contagious?
Who just told me to hold their beer, I ask you?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
