Covid-19 mutated into a more contagious strain, according to study

If it learns how to infect us over Zoom, we’re screwed.

Maybe it will just mutate into a form which breaks down rubber seals in aircraft.

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i don’t have the link off hand but this was the talking point a month or so ago. they were using advice from some lawyer who claimed that three identified virus transcription mutations were “strains” each less deadly and more contagious than the last.

using “darwinian economic theory” ( whatever that stupidity is ) he said every virus has a bell curve, no virus infects exponentially, and that the virus will essentially die off, become inert before it could kill very many of us

because he was a trump supporter they were using his advice despite his lack of credentials and despite his “theory”'s lack of connection to actual science

edit: Read this contentious New Yorker interview with the lawyer who wrote the coronavirus paper Trump embraces - Boing Boing

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Yeah the virus will do that before it kills 99% of us, because it will run out of hosts.

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well, at least the job creators will make it through okay. /s lord knows what they’ll have to eat once they’ve made it through the alex jones diet. :crying_cat_face:

basically, though, that was his “point.” viruses can’t spread exponentially because then we’d all be dead, and evolution wouldn’t make a virus that would kill us all because then it’d have no hosts

so wrong on every front, it’s hard to know where to begin. obviously corona doesn’t kill everyone that it infects, so there’s that. i think his initial guess was 500 people dead?

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Any headline like this, I instantly go to the original article. Its not my area, but checking for sound logic and good data analysis is usually not area specific. The paper does a very poor job of controling for confounding variables (especially location). The data most likely are easily explainable without that mutation having any effect at all on spread or morbidity.

Also, of course the virus mutates. That isn’t really news. Scary as “mutation” is in most sci-fi, we are all full of mutations

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The whole thread is worth reading to get a good sense of why these kind of things need more vetting before an alarm is sounded

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That’s why the post says “supposedly.”

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It doesn’t take much of an improvement for a virus to dominate a population. Even a 1% gain of function will dominate in a few generations. So “more contagious” is probably true, but it’s not “everybody dies now.”

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Peer review does not guarantee that a paper is correct, and it is slow compared to the spread of this virus, so it’s good in my view that unreviewed preprints can be made public quickly (with no subscription firewalls) and discussed on their merits. People complain about it, but in fact the system works quite well. In this case it took only a few hours from the LA Times story to reports (in boingboing and other places including WaPo) that experts are skeptical. That’s a pretty fast turnaround.

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The new strain will be called MurderHornets-20.

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Amazing challenge in this video:
Explaining Covid-19 and SARS without putting once the name of the country it origins: China! (But Spanish flu is “Stated Clearly”)

Alex Jones diet will continue then until capitalism consumes itself and there’s no one left. With unrestrained libertarian capitalism it’s the only possible outcome.

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Except that the only thing that spreads faster than the virus is bad information. This shit gets picked up by cable news and becomes truth. And then, because people don’t understand scientific method, it becomes harder to debunk. I don’t know what’s worse, the people who will only hear the original story, or the people who hear “both sides” and lose trust in scientists because they “don’t know anything.”

This paper is just like the 3000/day figure that’s swirling around; it’s part of an incomplete process that got published in a major paper because “the public needs to know.” Except maybe we don’t need to know now. What good does it really do a school teacher to know that a 1/3 complete statistical model says 3000 people a day could die? What good does it do to an out of work actor to know that COVID-19 might have mutated into a more contagious strain? What kind of action, that they aren’t already engaging in, can they take with this knowledge? Will it do more harm than good to sit on it and wait for something more final? These are the questions journalists and publishers don’t seem to be asking.

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But will it listen to Reason?

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I’ve got some shares in a chloroquine manufacturer that I’d like to sell you.

Well it won’t kill you if your body is shot full of depleted uranium shards, if that’s what you’re asking.

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I feel like there’s a lot of misreading and jumping to our standard frames of reference. The article says that the virus had already done the mutation, that changes in binding sites make it more contagious and possibly will mean people who had an earlier strain won’t be immune to this one.

I’m very critical of journalism these days, and how it gives free time to astroturf omzg-cornteam-is-fascism street theater while ignoring/downplaying labor activism. But there’s a big difference between parroting some company’s leak of their super-flawed study about how their drug kills coronavirus and gives you Fox news hostess hair and reporting (even breathlessly) about an actual paper that people can get, read, discuss, and so on.

The article raises the possibilities that a mutation makes sars-cov2 more contagious and that immunity might be strain specific. Not only are these unconfirmed hypotheses; they are quite improbable hypotheses.
When trump first started on the hydroxy chloroquine crap, there was preliminary data suggesting that it was possibly an effective treatment. See my comment on it 7 weeks ago:

Researchers releasing preliminary findings on covid is a good thing, but uncritical public reporting of preliminary findings is dangerous. The study of the mutations was done by experts and their improved mutation tracking methods are impressive, but that is irrelevant to whether the proposed hypotheses are true. The LA times reporting of this is only slightly better than trump’s crap. Not only is it an improbable, untested hypothesis. It has the potential to spark public reactions that can cause genuine harm, both in terms of public fear and undermining confidence in scientific research.

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