Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/28/coronairus-acts-like-no-path.html
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and at the same time the number of people who’ve had it and didn’t even know is astounding, if New York City really has over 2 million cases as indicated by antibody sampling.
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Well, that’s a cheery way to start the day. 
The main point for me of the NY Mag piece ends up being, “Keep doing all you can to avoid This Horrible Thing, and to avoid contact with others in case you’re asymptomatic.”
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There are people who still say “Aw, this is no worse than the flu”. And those same people will read articles like the one in the NY Mag piece (actually they’ll read only a small part of it and then throw it away, mostly because they’re ignorant semiliterate jackasses and partly because they realize that reading more would require them to actually think, which would be painful) and they’ll still give you the “no worse than the flu crap”. We need laws to identify these people and keep them from voting or reproducing.
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It seems clear that this virus will have considerable population level effects – not only by endangering the lives of all those who get infected ow, but probably in terms of long term damage to those who survive. There is already evidence of heart damage. I would not be surprised if we found that other vital organs (like the kidneys, which are showing clear signs of attack in many COVID19 patients) also were damaged in those who survived.
What is particularly disturbing is the suggestion that people who have not manifested symptoms, who did not know that they were sick, may have had long term damage done. Even if we can roll out an effective vaccine in the near future, as a population we will experience long term health impacts.
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I am not generally conspiracy theorist, but the strangeness of this virus is making me question the natural origins of this thing. Up until a week or so ago, when these outlier symptoms started showing up, I would have said that it’s just a natural variant of a particularly virulent coronavirus which we have no antibodies for, but with these weird symptoms like ‘covid toe’, strokes, etc. it does make one wonder.
Obviously, it likely is a natural virus, and we may find that many of these peculiar and seeminly unrelated symptoms have a common thread.
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How does it being possibly unnatural mean it has weird symptoms? Is that something that people synthesizing a virus are trying to do, make it have weird symptoms? Equivalently, why does having weird symptoms in any way imply it’s unnatural?
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is weird almost by definition, because it’s new. It seems perfectly reasonable that a weird virus has weird symptoms. What would be weird would be if it didn’t have weird symptoms.
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Why would a “natural” virus be less strange than a “artificial” virus? I’d say that random mutation can produce all sorts of weird shit. Look at pictures of deep sea fish for examples. Or the platypus.
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I honestly have to wonder if this isn’t the planet’s way of ‘fighting back’ after all the abuse, exploitation and wanton destruction our species has inflicted upon it…
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I mean, that’s as out there as a conspiracy theorist thinking it was made in a lab.
The planet doesn’t NEED to fight back. This thing was always here in some form or another. We got careless. We got really, really careless.
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No, they won’t.
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No, we don’t.
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It doesn’t have to be literally a fight-back but it kinda smells like karma nonetheless.
Poke enough wasp nests and eventually you’ll get stung, right?
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Give it a name, the sentiment remains the same.
Word; draconian measures like that always end up being weaponized against the most vulnerable and disenfranchised members of society.
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Weird symptoms are totally orthogonal to naturalness. It’s not like we have the technology to control what symptoms a deliberately created virus would have.
Numerous virus scientists have weighed in on this, and there’s essentially no chance it’s man made.
Specifically, it has a new protein spike, and any man made virus would have to use something previously known, because our biotechnology is not even remotely close to the level of being able to create an entirely novel infection mechanism that is infectious in humans.
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I did say;
Obviously, it likely is a natural virus, and we may find that many of these peculiar and seeminly unrelated symptoms have a common thread.
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As I said to commenter heng, from my original comment;
Obviously, it likely is a natural virus, and we may find that many of these peculiar and seeminly unrelated symptoms have a common thread.
The “weird” symptoms are the symptoms of sepsis
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Now it is coagulting blood…
Can we star calling it the Andromedra Strain now?
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I still think the coronavirus was the one that killed the dinosaurs, released when the icebergs melted. Good time to be a cockroach.
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