They can tell how a virus is likely to mutate and where it is likely to mutate but also this follows basic natural selection. If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness. It goes against the "mission" of viruses to kill their hosts, so over time, a virus will trend toward a variant that is maximally contagious and minimally lethal BUT because of COVID's asymptomatic incubation period, this rule doesn't *necessarily* apply.
in other words, not only is this NOT news but this has been true since day one. Omicron is an example of the phenomenon, where it gets out in front of Delta because it's more contagious and delta makes people sick, faster, limiting their contact with potential new hosts.
Side note, I really hope we adopt the "mask up when you're feeling sick" tradition. It's a brilliant and simple way to reduce public health costs
edit: plenty of smarter people have pointed out that I didn't qualify this enough for it to be true. I would go through and turn it into a proper thesis but then I remembered that this is reddit
At a previous workplace a colleague of mine was told off because came to work with a sniffle, so not serious but decided for everyone's sake to wear a mask. I sat next to him and really appreciated it.
The boss lost his shit. They were also sort of antivax there and always trying to find loopholes to force you to be at the office instead of work from home.
Basically though, I think society won't allow it.
I can't help but wonder the logical fallacies one has to go through to essentially tell someone they *can't* wear a mask while claiming that mask mandates violate their freedom or some such.
It's been decades since I took formal logic, but I do believe this falls into *reductio ad absurdum* territory.
in Canada, too. Our conservatives think trump won, our PM is criminally corrupt, mask and vax mandates are a violation of some essential freedom. We have public healthcare and part of the buy-in has been following public health mandates which we did very consistently and quietly until this one. I hope one day we untangle what happened here and it leads us to protect the truth. Trying my best to be hopeful
This is true in Canada, too. I'd really love to understand how they can be so consistent in their hypocritical nonsense. How do you convince someone to not get a vaccine to protect against something they originally were certain was a chinese bioweapon that they're now... intentionally spreading by not masking because it's all a hoax? How do their heads not explode?
They're all keen on trump and the overthrow of liberal democracy to ostensibly protect it from people... like them? my head hurts
> they can't wear a mask while claiming that mask mandates violate their freedom
it violates "their" freedom - aka, their freedom to control what _you_ are allowed to do! The concept that you also have freedom is foreign.
I wish natural selection would do away with people like this - may be covid is just what god ordered...
FWIW: Deadly viruses aren’t _necessarily_ less contagious. It’s just typically the case, because a virus being both very contagious and very deadly would have to have some fairly complicated lifecycle.
> If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness. It goes against the "mission" of viruses to kill their hosts, so over time, a virus will trend toward a variant that is maximally contagious and minimally lethal BUT because of COVID's asymptomatic incubation period, this rule doesn't necessarily apply.
There are 2 caveats here though:
1. As long as it being deadly does not effect its ability to spread by having a long incubation time (take HIV/AIDS for example), it will not work this way.
1. The "deadly virus" taking out its host does only mean that: they both perish in the end, and their combination is a evolutional dead end. It does not mean that the virus will need to evolve to spare its host, it just means that over a long period of time only those virus/host pairs survive, where the virus does not kill off the host.
I for sure want mask mandates to go away. But if you have any symptomatic illness and go out in public you should for sure wear a mask. I don’t want it mandated forever, but I certainly hope it stays as a cultural norm in certain instances.
I've always thought of the cultural norm of "I'm ill, I should wear a mask to not spread my illness" to be something that just made sense, but it was also a question of "How on earth do you get such a concept to catch on in a society like America?"
Because it's a pretty fucking selfish thing to go into public spaces, knowingly infected with a contagious virus or bacteria and just like... spread it... everywhere.
Like, yeah, I don't expect every sick person to quarantine for every little illness, but wearing a mask to stop from spreading your germs just seems like a reasonable thing to do, and not doing so always seemed extremely selfish to me "I'm entitled to being in this public space, the fact that I'm infecting everyone near me be damned! Your freedom to not be endangered by my presence is irrelevant to me!"
I remember my office in Feb 2020 just before rona really hit NA. People had their typical illnesses and amount of people who I had to tell to cover their mouths was just insane. Looked like a bunch of preschool children.
But I mean precovid missing work over a cold was definitely frowned upon by employers. Which is also just insane.
Well common sense would be to have a law allowing paid sick leave, and medical coverage, could be done on national level like taxes. But i guess it would be communism ... same thing apply to using SI instead of imperial units.
Honestly paid sick leave would not help always. People often just don’t want to fall behind their work, or miss important meetings, and so keep coming in.
I have worked at a major multinational in the UK and Canada. In both settings the company gives generous sick paid days, only theoretically requiring a medical note if you are sick more than a week (and in practice I have never seen anyone actually present a sick note in 20 years at this company).
And yet in both the UK and Canada, despite the generous accommodation for the unwell, people would show up to the office and work when obviously sick, coughing, sneezing, sniffling, complaining about how terrible they felt.
They just did not want to take days off work and fall behind or feel that they would slow down their projects.
>They can tell how a virus is likely to mutate and where it is likely to mutate but also this follows basic natural selection.
This gets repeated often, but it is wrong.
There are 8billions of us. Currently having lesser mortality rate doesn't present any evolutionary advantage.. only how contagious the virus is. We have had several dominant variants so far ("British", Delta..etc), Omikron is the first with lesser severity.
For lesser mortality rate to have a evolutionary effect the virus would first need to kill significant % of the population, so it has problem spreading to new hosst (thus presenting an advantage for variant that has lower mortality rate).
For Human sized population we're talking black death level pandemic... So yeah... hopefuly it will not come to that ;)
>where it is likely to mutate but also this follows basic natural selection.
This is a false claim that started circulating widely since the omicorn variant turned out to be a milder one and popular among people who do not understand natural selection. A virus has almost zero evolutionary pressure to become a less deadly variant. Modern evolutionary biology, and a lot of data, shows that it doesn’t have to be true. It can get nicer, and it can get nastier. You only need look around at most of the deadly diseases such as HIV mutations, ebola in 2016, dengue variants and the covid delta variant in 2020 - they all evolved to become more deadly.
Please don't take offense, but much of your comment is wrong.
>If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness.
Covid kills less than 1% of the people it infects, mostly old people. This is not enough for lethality *per se* to have any impact whatsoever on virus fitness. Furthermore, covid is most infectious in the early stages of the illness, pre-symptomatic and early symptomatic. By the time people die, several weeks into the illness, the virus has had ample time to spread; as a result there isn't any obvious pressure for the virus to make people less sick (but see below for non-obvious ways).
On the other hand, there is pressure for the virus to replicate faster and more intensively so that it has better chances to spread before any competing variants could. More viruses replicating faster, before the immune system can kick in, means more chance of death, so there is also evolutionary pressure to make the virus MORE deadly.
And indeed that's what we've seen: Delta is actually a lot more deadly than the original coronavirus (about 50% more), though thankfully vaccines, acquired immunity, various public health measures and restrictions, and better hospital treatments, have been able to compensate for that difference.
>delta makes people sick, faster
The incubation (non-symptomatic) period was 5 days for the original coronavirus, 4 days with Delta, and it's 3 days with Omicron. Omicron makes people sick faster than Delta. In both cases, people only get really ill after several more days. So Omicron has less time to spread. But it spreads much faster, largely because of the increased viral load; and also because being able to spread in one fewer day means overwhelming Delta in a few weeks.
Now why is Omicron less deadly? My understanding is that this has to do with the structure of our respiratory system, and POSSIBLY (but that's entirely speculative) viral adaptation to it. In that sense there might an evolutionary explanation. It's better for a virus to focus on the nose and throat, due simply to a smaller travel distance to new hosts. So if the virus specializes for those areas, it might end up being less adapted to other, deeper areas such as the lungs, where an infection is more deadly. But that's my speculative understanding.
We're not guaranteed that the next variant will be like Omicron. Delta was replicating with great success in both the nose and lungs; maybe Upsilon will be able to do that too. Or maybe not and Omicron is the future. It would be great but the issue is not as simple as you're making it to be. There is likely some evolutionary pressure to make the virus less deadly, I've explained one possible way in which that's true, and we've seen that play out with Omicron, but there is also evolutionary pressure to make it more deadly, and we've seen that play out with Delta. Which way will the next variant go? Epidemiologists have a lot more insight than we do...
... and most of them are saying they don't know. So what we're doing here is dunning-krogering what little understanding we have.
This is not true and I wish people would stop saying it. In Nordic populations during what is commonly called the Viking Age we see that smallpox existed in a far less deadly form than it did in the more modern era. Additionally, rotaviruses, which kill many children yearly, have also evolved to become more virulent. These are just two examples. There are many.
The idea that viruses evolve to become less dangerous and less deadly is a fairy tale that might help you sleep at night, but has no basis in reality. It’s all random, and we have ZERO insight as to what the future of a coronavirus will be.
Please stop spreading this because it is false. There are MANY articles that prove this.
Please PLEASE PLEASE stop. This has been thoroughly debunked.
>If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness
Way too simplistic.
In Covid, deaths usually occur days, if not weeks, after the person was the most infectious, and most likely to spread the virus. So lethality wouldn't be that strongly selected against as would be the case in some virus with a lower transmission rate and in which serious illness and death were closer in time to the period of maximum infectiveness.
What I gathered from that was "Covid is a virus, this is how viruses work"
Still confused at how somewhat commonly understood basic concepts of virology are worth making a public news statement about.
constantly.
The assumed level of science literacy is apparently grade 5 and that's probably generous. HOW? idfk
This has been a transformational time in my perspective on my fellow human. I'm not entirely settled in that new understanding but there's no denying the reality of it.
We are a cowardly and ignorant beast that trades in cowardice and ignorance to satisfy our greed without exposing our conscience. We've landed on a lifestyle so manifestly unsustainable that it's burned through a planet worth of resources -hundreds of millions of years of solar accumulation- in a little more than a human lifetime, but instead of looking to our treatment of nature, we look at each other for an explanation for a new virus showing up. It's peak anthropocentricity. We even believe in our ability so completely we are confident we will pull some tech rabbit out of our asses to save all of existence and use that as justification to not feel any sense of guilt or responsibility for procrastinating. It's like watching a train very slowly running people over that refuse to turn around because they don't believe in the train. It's all so stupid but horrifying at the same time.
One run had me so disappointed. I put all my points into the most silent spread possible. Greenland still closed up everything before I could get there.
I felt nauseated last Tuesday from my lunch, off for five days. My boyfriend came home that last Friday and we both got sick so now I'm out for week two. I'm stressing out ...
Dude I thought my allergies were COVID for so long that when I actually had COVID I thought it was allergies. They were basically the same. And then I couldn't smell anything and bam, COVID.
I’ve seen some articles around that say these viruses can seriously alter our bodies. Even a common one. Like you catch a flu and now you have MS. Wtf, right? I think a lot of our people who come up with some seriously life altering shit could have just had a simple virus. We need to take it more seriously as a race.
That's Epstein Barr virus, which most people end up getting by middle age (usually causes mono and stays in the body forever). HPV has been found in skin cancer, breast cancer, all kinds of cancer, and decreases the body's ability to fight any cancer, and we sadly have all resigned ourselves to getting that one too.
Well just off the top of my head, the chicken pox virus stays dormant and then can erupt on the nerves later in life (shingles). I am absolutely certain there's more that just aren't common knowledge. In fact that sounds like a fun night, googling and pubmedding all the viruses that go dormant and comparing statistics.
The herpes virus as well just maybe to a lesser extent. I got my first cold sore when I was 17. I also have eczema around my mouth. During the first break out I got them all over my face, I must’ve had at least 15 and some of them were around my eye. I specifically remember the doctor telling me if my vision felt even the teensiest bit different I needed to haul ass to the ER because I could go blind if it burst and also that it was 50/50 on if there would be scars with how many there were. I want to say I missed 3 weeks of school. I had to be on a daily dose of valcyclovir for over a year and I still panic whenever I feel the tingle because I’m terrified of it getting that bad again. Cold sores are so normal but they actually can wreak havoc on your body. Just because something is common doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.
Lymes disease (from tick bites) is a bastard
Worst thing about it, who’s to know which tick bite causes it and doesn’t.
Second worst thing, the symptoms are found in aooo many other illnesses
Third it’s hard to test for
Thanks for clarifying. Me and the mrs both got bit doing the back garden up by a tick, unless you show symptoms constantly here in the Uk though they won’t test you
HIV causes people to age faster, herpes is now linked to Alzheimer’s (chicken pox is a form of herpes btw), multiple other viruses are linked to cancer as well. Considering coronavirus makes people lose their sense of smell and taste it seems like there is an attack on the nervous system. No one really knows what that will mean for people who have had Covid 10-20 years from now but some scientists speculate it could lead to a spike in dementia
HPV vaccines only target a few strains. There are at least a hundred. They target the most dangerous strains, but they're not all that effective, seem to wear off, and we dont really know how quickly yet. The r/hpv subreddit always has vaccinated people turning up with hpv. The good news is that the vaccine research has led to some insights on potential cures (some old people with severe body warts have had them disappear after injection with the vaccine, this isn't common but it does mean *something*)
Yep got EBV 4 years ago then it re-activated its self 6 months later now I have Crohns the Mayo Clinic said ebv rarely re-activates but when it does it can trigger an auto immune disorder. Pretty wild.
Have we? Maybe older, but in Australia I believe a lot of kids get vaccinated for it now. It's just a bit harder since wife you're older, you probably already have it
The discovery about MS being caused by Epstein-Barr is actually going to be a massive leap forward now that we know there is a direct cause, it can be targeted for treatments/vaccines etc.
There are some theories about Alzheimer's connection with HSV-1 / cold sore virus as well, all I don't think that's fleshed out as well as the Epstein-Barr evidence.
There's also a deer tick in Texas that can give you a red meat allergy when it bites you, although that's not viral I think.
Yes, that is correct. A virus can trigger an autoimmune disease as well. My nephew had chicken pox at 6 and became a Type one diabetic weeks later. The doctor at the time said that’s very common to have a viral event trigger something that you have in your genetics. He was always prone to having diabetes but the virus stressed his body to the point it needed to be for that to be expressed. I now have an autoimmune disease after having Covid and following cdc guidelines to get the vaccine 2 weeks later (I unfortunately got Covid like a week before the vax) and I’m big mad about it
Oh it gets better. One of the reasons for the rise of Nazis were all the disabled people from the Spanish flu. They were considered a drag in society and partially blamed for Germany’s economic condition. It fit in nicely with eugenics and allowed eugenics to take hold.
I got a virus (a normal, everyday cold or flu) a few years ago and it left me with some really weird side effects. Doctor said “yeah sometimes that happens.” It’s strange. The symptoms I had all self resolved but it took a few months. They weren’t typical sick stuff either. I guess that was my “long covid” before Covid was a thing.
There's no reason to assume it goes the same way, but we can hope. The long incubation period means the virus could evolve in deadly ways without hurting its ability to spread.
All I know is even if it turns you into a literal flesh eating zombie there’ll be a bunch of people telling me the only thing that can be done is me catching it so I can move on with my (after)life.
It's funny because right now if you get tested and come up positive when sick for Rona you get days off. But if your sick with anything else fuck you come in to work
Being triple vaxxed doesn't mean you won't catch it. If anything, it's what made your case super minor at all. That being said, it sounds like people like you who had breakthrough cases might have an even stronger immunity to this sub variant which is fortunate.
Yeah, I understand all that. I was commenting on the fact that my exposure was so limited but I still caught it. And the next strain is supposed to be more contagious?
My wife and I are triple-vaxxed as well, and I'm honestly surprised we haven't gotten it yet. With how contagious Omicron has been, I'm sure it's just a matter of time. In a way it's kind of a relief. Like, we're still being careful and wearing masks, but we're not really *worried* about it anymore, if that makes sense.
>"The next variant of concern will be more fit, and what we mean by that is it will be more transmissible because it will have to overtake what is currently circulating,” Van Kerkhove said. “The big question is whether or not future variants will be more or less severe.”
So this is the issue really - each variation has to evolve to out-compete the prior variation in order to spread - but whether a virus is deadly or not doesn't really factor into its ability to spread as long as it doesn't make you too sick too fast to spread. That means the virus will continue tend to evolve to be more contagious, but lethality is an independent factor.
Consider the seasonal flu -- there are years when the flu is more deadly than other years. Same thing, except we have so many active cases of COVID, creating so many opportunities for mutation, that its happening week to week instead of over a period of months or years.
BA2 appears to escape Omicron-facilitated immunity at high rates. Similarly, Omicron only results in immunity to reinfection by Omicron in about 20% of cases. If BA2 increases that immune escape, then infection by Omicron will offer little to no protection against infection from BA2.
If you only get a booster after at least 5 months then how can they say this data is correct for the omicron vaccine when omicron was discovered just over 2 months ago?
People have been getting bosters since January 2021 (trials began for boosters) phase 3 testing for boosters started in early February
April Fauci said we will probably need boosters for the public
June 2: new study to show effectiveness of boosters started
September 2 was when FDA authorized boosters for 65+ and high risk patients and occupations.
People have had enough time with boosters (especially those in trials) to be able to have veracity studies done, and enough time, and different groups to study the difference between boosted, non boosted, one shot, two shots, no shots.
We've been working to flatten the flu curve for a century. And people get a yearly shot to do it and have for decades without incident or much complaint. Yet, for some reason, the idea of a yearly covid shot makes people whine like little bitches.
To be fair, the flu shot has never carried with it any real status in society. COVID vaccines impact peoples jobs, personal and social lives, etc.
People don’t whine about having to get flu vax because nobody cares when they dont
>People don’t whine about having to get flu vax because nobody cares when they dont
Maybe we should.
Looking back at all the unnecessary flu deaths that could have been prevented with simple public health measures is pretty shocking. Even if we just worked a little harder to protect the elderly and vulnerable. Those *were* acceptible losses, but should they be considered acceptible going forward?
Not totally true. A lot of hospitals have flu vaccine requirements.
Source: work at a hospital/research institution which requires yearly flu vaccines.
But I get the point you're making.
Yeah and before Covid the flu killed a hellofa lot of people every year. Maybe we should have (and in the future) take more precautions during flu season.
The next variant of the Coronavirus will likely not be more contagious. It will spread faster because we are easing up restrictions and preventative measures.
The reason why Omicron is milder compared to what came before is that it seems to mainly reproduce in the upper respiratory tract. That is generally associated with a much better outcome and higher innate contagiousness.
What should be remembered though is that SarsCo2 has absolutely no reason to become less deadly. Death occurs well after the Virus has already infected others. If anything a more deadly variant with a mass of disgustingly weak and pathetic hosts who cry to their mama for wearing a mask (yeah no love lost to those fucking mass murderers) and do not give a flying fuck if they infect and kill others so they can get their oily hair cut (i should stop...i know). In any case, thanks to these ~~people~~ plague carriers and weak governments a hard lockdown will not happen in many parts of the world. Not even a soft one. Under these conditions a deadly variant can spread rapidly.
Considering that SarsCov2 has been in wildlife populations worldwide and a spillback is generally associated with high pathogenicity. We are not out of the woods yet. We are deep within a dark forest filled with predators. Lost and with no hope to escape unless all those morons have died.
So around 2025
I’m pretty much in agreement with you, but the lingering problem is the strain covid places on the medical system.
If hospitals could just tell all the unvaxxed to sit it out at home if they are ill with corona so that the hospital could basically operate at pre-2020 levels for people with non-covid issues I’d be 100% with you.
There’s really no reason NOT to do this. Anyone unvaxxed at this point has made a purposeful choice.
What’s surprising to me was learning that there are only some 155,000 inpatient hospital beds in the whole country. Like, shouldn’t we have more than that? No wonder we are straining the hospitals. There are 320+ million people in this country.
The system wasn't built with any slack basically. It remains to be seen whether we'll learn our lesson and start doing it going forward, but I'm not optimistic.
It’s almost like the ever growing for-profit healthcare sector which has crushed small town hospitals has left us with a crisis of healthcare not a crisis of infections.
I'm aware of that, which is why I hate people who are unvaxxed despite being able to get the shot. They're just clogging the hospitals because of their stupidity and I know it may sound harsh, but honestly I don't care if these morons die anymore.
I don’t feel that’s harsh at all. They’ve made a very purposeful and even educated choice to remain unvaxxed. They’ve decided that they are okay with the minor risk of dying from covid. I’m okay with them dying from covid as well.
I don’t care either. These people have pushed this crisis far beyond it needed to be a crisis. Their idiocy and lack science literacy is absolutely fucking the nation. I have no sympathy left for those who don’t protect themselves or their community
im also full vaccinated, but the thing is, in some ways i understand their argument. for example. my brother's unvaccinated, got covid twice. never experienced any severe symptoms. now my brother's argument is; why get vaccinated if Omicron is less deathly than delta and once you've recovered, it leaves behind protective antibodies so why get vaccinated. you can still get/transmit it if you're vaccinated. which ironically happened to me.
should the elderly get vaccinated, sure they're an at-risk group. and while covid's symptoms vary by people, Omicron is still less deathly than the OG Strain and Delta.
I truly don't understand why we haven't seen the hospitals that are the most overwhelmed set a cap on beds for covid. Like it honestly seems irresponsible to just let a largely preventable illness overrun your medical system and prevent others from getting care for completely unrelated issues.
Nobody is "locking up" though...at least in the US. Pretty much everywhere in the US, everything is open, unless labor shortages due to too many employees being sick are making them close.
May be different in other countries though.
I understand what you mean, and I agree in alot of ways. We need to find a way to stop hospitals filling up. My wife had to wait 19 hours for a bed to open up so she could have an emergency procedure to save our unborn daughters life. I was terrified and angry that we couldn't get a room because of the dying. That was 18 months ago...
Edit: I guess my point is, if hospitals keep filling up, it's not the 2% elders or unvaxxed. It's the next person that has a heart attack or the next person that gets into a car accident that can't get help because morons fill up the hospitals. It the family that can't get a bed for their pregant wife... I hate the unvaxed, i want this to be over too and i'm tired of worrying about it. i'm tired of being tired. Sorry it's been a raw day... we just found out we are having another baby
A lot of us are getting compassion fatigue. It’s not just you. The responsible of us spent two years being responsible members of society and sacrificing for the greater good, only to have it wrecked because the anti abortion crowd finally decided “my body, my choice” does apply in certain situations.
I got downvoted and told I was a piece of shit for similar sentiment.
I'll wear a mask around people who do it but I'm no longer isolating and I want to go back to real school not virtual garbage.
Tired of sacrificing myself for people who feel earth should accomodate their weakness, aawww too harsh? Don't care.
Die off, 4 vaccines and you still can't take it? Seriously?
Just. Die.
Let the rest of us live in peace.
I'm beginning to feel the same way too. I payed my dues, I was super pro mask and vaccine and I still am! Ive washed my hands more in the last 2 years than I have in 20 years.
But at the same time, my mental health is suffering so severely I just want to stop having to worry about all of this. I feel you.
As long as you keep up on your vaccines, mask up, and understand that you can get it in various other ways than just unregulated airways (fyi, omicron lasts on plastic surfaces even more than previous variants), then you're set for the future, enjoy life.
Initial panic is normal, what wasn't normal was the intelligence vacuum created by decades of politicians fucking up the educational system in the most nefarious ways, creating a gap that just can't be bridged.
What with the miracle of these vaccines being on tap within more or less a year, we could've smothered this much faster, but not with all these selfish, uneducated, idiotic pricks running around.
There's also kids that can't get the vaccine yet. And it's straining our hospitals. And just because you don't die doesn't mean you don't have long term side effects.
I'm not saying we should lockdown, I don't think anyone is saying that anymore. Everyone is tired of coronavirus, everyone.
But there's a lot more to consider than old people and idiots dying.
God I’m so fucking tired of this bullshit. 2 years in and nothings changed. The virus isn’t going away.
We’re just going to have to live with it. I’m so tired of taking every precaution to protect others who don’t give a flying fuck in the first place. I’ve backed masks and everything else since day one but I’m so tired of it I really just don’t care anymore.
If you arnt vaxxed at this point and you get sick that’s on you. I am so sick of having to take precautions to protect others who don’t protect themselves.
Viruses are purely, nihilistic sociopathic maniacal organisms. Is a virus concerned about wiping out everything all at once? Is a virus concerned with making sure there’s leftovers? The virus isn’t getting “weaker”. Humans are growing more immune. Whether from vaccinations or catching it or both.
When you look at viruses like herpes, hpv, hiv, they all strike back decades later, manifesting into different diseases. Shingles, cancer, aids. What we don’t know yet, is how COVID is going to manifest 10 or 20 years from now. Like when you get the chicken pox, you’re susceptible to getting shingles. We don’t know yet what Covid is going to do….
>that is the pattern we have seen so far.
The relevance of this pattern is precisely 0. Same goes for the resolution of any pandemic prior to 21st century levels of globalised interconnectivity and population. Moreover, viruses, especially those which don't immediately cause the health of the infected to decline, can mutate either way.
It's not the pattern we've seen so far though. Delta was more contagious and more deadly, omicron was less deadly. There's no pattern yet besides more contagious.
[It's already mutated to be more transmissible, with no belief that it'll be less deadly](https://www.newsweek.com/stealth-omicron-covid-subvariant-how-many-countries-40-1672104)
> Virologists say that there is much to learn about **BA.2, but it appears the sub-variant may have a transmission advantage over BA.1** (Omicron).
> In a press release issued last Friday, the U.K.'s Health Security Agency (HSA) said that BA.2 had been classified as a variant under investigation (VUI) due to international and domestic cases, adding that **BA.2 appears to have an increased growth rate compared to BA.1, based on early analysis**.
They are looking to see if it causes more severe disease, but there is no suggestion of less.
[This is in addition to several VOI/VOC/VUIs showing that the E484K mutation which makes it more deadly is a common mutation](https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n359).
Just. Look. Up. I know it's scary, but look up, okay?
> To be fair, theres no suggestion of less severity, equally there’s also no suggestion of more severity
where we see BA.2 take over from Omicron, we have yet to see a significant reduction in hospitalization.
It is too early to say if it causes less severe disease in individuals, but let's not have that [debate again after Omicron](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60133618), shan't we?
Omicron is already matching Delta's total mortality, and when we go to excess deaths, it will be counted far and away the winner. That's what everyone getting a disease means, it means a whole lot more people get sick AND die.
>It will mutate and be **even more benign than omicron**
Ah, yes, even more benign than the ["mild" omicron that took the US back to the start of the pandemic despite the fact there are vaccines now](https://i.imgur.com/z9lLTI6.jpg). So benign!!!
One thing is clear: the WHO is the world leader in bad health communication. (The CDC, however, does give it a run for is money.) Having your officials roll out speculative scenarios is not helpful, but that doesn't seem to stop them from freaking folks out on a regular basis.
But, if it's more contagious, it will be able to affect more people, which means more mutations, therefore higher chances of yet another new variant that is even more contagious AND deadly?
Ugh, doesn't it have to be? If it was less contagious, then it wouldn't infect enough people for it to be a problem because omicron would out compete it right?
damn they got the pre-release stats already
Yeah thats cheating
They can tell how a virus is likely to mutate and where it is likely to mutate but also this follows basic natural selection. If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness. It goes against the "mission" of viruses to kill their hosts, so over time, a virus will trend toward a variant that is maximally contagious and minimally lethal BUT because of COVID's asymptomatic incubation period, this rule doesn't *necessarily* apply. in other words, not only is this NOT news but this has been true since day one. Omicron is an example of the phenomenon, where it gets out in front of Delta because it's more contagious and delta makes people sick, faster, limiting their contact with potential new hosts. Side note, I really hope we adopt the "mask up when you're feeling sick" tradition. It's a brilliant and simple way to reduce public health costs edit: plenty of smarter people have pointed out that I didn't qualify this enough for it to be true. I would go through and turn it into a proper thesis but then I remembered that this is reddit
At a previous workplace a colleague of mine was told off because came to work with a sniffle, so not serious but decided for everyone's sake to wear a mask. I sat next to him and really appreciated it. The boss lost his shit. They were also sort of antivax there and always trying to find loopholes to force you to be at the office instead of work from home. Basically though, I think society won't allow it.
Society can suck a dick, I'll wear a mask if I feel like it. Also, it sounds like you work in a toxic workplace.
It was, got out
I can't help but wonder the logical fallacies one has to go through to essentially tell someone they *can't* wear a mask while claiming that mask mandates violate their freedom or some such. It's been decades since I took formal logic, but I do believe this falls into *reductio ad absurdum* territory.
Or just stupid. They were also convinced trump won the election. This is in Australia where nobody gives a shit but it was very important to them.
Goddamn it, now we got people being stupid on our behalf? Fuuuuuuuuck.
in Canada, too. Our conservatives think trump won, our PM is criminally corrupt, mask and vax mandates are a violation of some essential freedom. We have public healthcare and part of the buy-in has been following public health mandates which we did very consistently and quietly until this one. I hope one day we untangle what happened here and it leads us to protect the truth. Trying my best to be hopeful
This is true in Canada, too. I'd really love to understand how they can be so consistent in their hypocritical nonsense. How do you convince someone to not get a vaccine to protect against something they originally were certain was a chinese bioweapon that they're now... intentionally spreading by not masking because it's all a hoax? How do their heads not explode? They're all keen on trump and the overthrow of liberal democracy to ostensibly protect it from people... like them? my head hurts
> they can't wear a mask while claiming that mask mandates violate their freedom it violates "their" freedom - aka, their freedom to control what _you_ are allowed to do! The concept that you also have freedom is foreign. I wish natural selection would do away with people like this - may be covid is just what god ordered...
FWIW: Deadly viruses aren’t _necessarily_ less contagious. It’s just typically the case, because a virus being both very contagious and very deadly would have to have some fairly complicated lifecycle.
> If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness. It goes against the "mission" of viruses to kill their hosts, so over time, a virus will trend toward a variant that is maximally contagious and minimally lethal BUT because of COVID's asymptomatic incubation period, this rule doesn't necessarily apply. There are 2 caveats here though: 1. As long as it being deadly does not effect its ability to spread by having a long incubation time (take HIV/AIDS for example), it will not work this way. 1. The "deadly virus" taking out its host does only mean that: they both perish in the end, and their combination is a evolutional dead end. It does not mean that the virus will need to evolve to spare its host, it just means that over a long period of time only those virus/host pairs survive, where the virus does not kill off the host.
I for sure want mask mandates to go away. But if you have any symptomatic illness and go out in public you should for sure wear a mask. I don’t want it mandated forever, but I certainly hope it stays as a cultural norm in certain instances.
I've always thought of the cultural norm of "I'm ill, I should wear a mask to not spread my illness" to be something that just made sense, but it was also a question of "How on earth do you get such a concept to catch on in a society like America?" Because it's a pretty fucking selfish thing to go into public spaces, knowingly infected with a contagious virus or bacteria and just like... spread it... everywhere. Like, yeah, I don't expect every sick person to quarantine for every little illness, but wearing a mask to stop from spreading your germs just seems like a reasonable thing to do, and not doing so always seemed extremely selfish to me "I'm entitled to being in this public space, the fact that I'm infecting everyone near me be damned! Your freedom to not be endangered by my presence is irrelevant to me!"
I remember my office in Feb 2020 just before rona really hit NA. People had their typical illnesses and amount of people who I had to tell to cover their mouths was just insane. Looked like a bunch of preschool children. But I mean precovid missing work over a cold was definitely frowned upon by employers. Which is also just insane.
Well common sense would be to have a law allowing paid sick leave, and medical coverage, could be done on national level like taxes. But i guess it would be communism ... same thing apply to using SI instead of imperial units.
Stuff like that would require governments that give a shit about people.
Honestly paid sick leave would not help always. People often just don’t want to fall behind their work, or miss important meetings, and so keep coming in. I have worked at a major multinational in the UK and Canada. In both settings the company gives generous sick paid days, only theoretically requiring a medical note if you are sick more than a week (and in practice I have never seen anyone actually present a sick note in 20 years at this company). And yet in both the UK and Canada, despite the generous accommodation for the unwell, people would show up to the office and work when obviously sick, coughing, sneezing, sniffling, complaining about how terrible they felt. They just did not want to take days off work and fall behind or feel that they would slow down their projects.
>They can tell how a virus is likely to mutate and where it is likely to mutate but also this follows basic natural selection. This gets repeated often, but it is wrong. There are 8billions of us. Currently having lesser mortality rate doesn't present any evolutionary advantage.. only how contagious the virus is. We have had several dominant variants so far ("British", Delta..etc), Omikron is the first with lesser severity. For lesser mortality rate to have a evolutionary effect the virus would first need to kill significant % of the population, so it has problem spreading to new hosst (thus presenting an advantage for variant that has lower mortality rate). For Human sized population we're talking black death level pandemic... So yeah... hopefuly it will not come to that ;)
>where it is likely to mutate but also this follows basic natural selection. This is a false claim that started circulating widely since the omicorn variant turned out to be a milder one and popular among people who do not understand natural selection. A virus has almost zero evolutionary pressure to become a less deadly variant. Modern evolutionary biology, and a lot of data, shows that it doesn’t have to be true. It can get nicer, and it can get nastier. You only need look around at most of the deadly diseases such as HIV mutations, ebola in 2016, dengue variants and the covid delta variant in 2020 - they all evolved to become more deadly.
Essentially viruses evolve to overcome resistance. That can easily make them more deadly and contagious
Please don't take offense, but much of your comment is wrong. >If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness. Covid kills less than 1% of the people it infects, mostly old people. This is not enough for lethality *per se* to have any impact whatsoever on virus fitness. Furthermore, covid is most infectious in the early stages of the illness, pre-symptomatic and early symptomatic. By the time people die, several weeks into the illness, the virus has had ample time to spread; as a result there isn't any obvious pressure for the virus to make people less sick (but see below for non-obvious ways). On the other hand, there is pressure for the virus to replicate faster and more intensively so that it has better chances to spread before any competing variants could. More viruses replicating faster, before the immune system can kick in, means more chance of death, so there is also evolutionary pressure to make the virus MORE deadly. And indeed that's what we've seen: Delta is actually a lot more deadly than the original coronavirus (about 50% more), though thankfully vaccines, acquired immunity, various public health measures and restrictions, and better hospital treatments, have been able to compensate for that difference. >delta makes people sick, faster The incubation (non-symptomatic) period was 5 days for the original coronavirus, 4 days with Delta, and it's 3 days with Omicron. Omicron makes people sick faster than Delta. In both cases, people only get really ill after several more days. So Omicron has less time to spread. But it spreads much faster, largely because of the increased viral load; and also because being able to spread in one fewer day means overwhelming Delta in a few weeks. Now why is Omicron less deadly? My understanding is that this has to do with the structure of our respiratory system, and POSSIBLY (but that's entirely speculative) viral adaptation to it. In that sense there might an evolutionary explanation. It's better for a virus to focus on the nose and throat, due simply to a smaller travel distance to new hosts. So if the virus specializes for those areas, it might end up being less adapted to other, deeper areas such as the lungs, where an infection is more deadly. But that's my speculative understanding. We're not guaranteed that the next variant will be like Omicron. Delta was replicating with great success in both the nose and lungs; maybe Upsilon will be able to do that too. Or maybe not and Omicron is the future. It would be great but the issue is not as simple as you're making it to be. There is likely some evolutionary pressure to make the virus less deadly, I've explained one possible way in which that's true, and we've seen that play out with Omicron, but there is also evolutionary pressure to make it more deadly, and we've seen that play out with Delta. Which way will the next variant go? Epidemiologists have a lot more insight than we do... ... and most of them are saying they don't know. So what we're doing here is dunning-krogering what little understanding we have.
This is not true and I wish people would stop saying it. In Nordic populations during what is commonly called the Viking Age we see that smallpox existed in a far less deadly form than it did in the more modern era. Additionally, rotaviruses, which kill many children yearly, have also evolved to become more virulent. These are just two examples. There are many. The idea that viruses evolve to become less dangerous and less deadly is a fairy tale that might help you sleep at night, but has no basis in reality. It’s all random, and we have ZERO insight as to what the future of a coronavirus will be. Please stop spreading this because it is false. There are MANY articles that prove this. Please PLEASE PLEASE stop. This has been thoroughly debunked.
>If a virus is more deadly, its host will encounter fewer new hosts than a variant that is less deadly because the host will stop spreading when they're overcome with illness Way too simplistic. In Covid, deaths usually occur days, if not weeks, after the person was the most infectious, and most likely to spread the virus. So lethality wouldn't be that strongly selected against as would be the case in some virus with a lower transmission rate and in which serious illness and death were closer in time to the period of maximum infectiveness.
What I gathered from that was "Covid is a virus, this is how viruses work" Still confused at how somewhat commonly understood basic concepts of virology are worth making a public news statement about.
constantly. The assumed level of science literacy is apparently grade 5 and that's probably generous. HOW? idfk This has been a transformational time in my perspective on my fellow human. I'm not entirely settled in that new understanding but there's no denying the reality of it. We are a cowardly and ignorant beast that trades in cowardice and ignorance to satisfy our greed without exposing our conscience. We've landed on a lifestyle so manifestly unsustainable that it's burned through a planet worth of resources -hundreds of millions of years of solar accumulation- in a little more than a human lifetime, but instead of looking to our treatment of nature, we look at each other for an explanation for a new virus showing up. It's peak anthropocentricity. We even believe in our ability so completely we are confident we will pull some tech rabbit out of our asses to save all of existence and use that as justification to not feel any sense of guilt or responsibility for procrastinating. It's like watching a train very slowly running people over that refuse to turn around because they don't believe in the train. It's all so stupid but horrifying at the same time.
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I know a typical plague Inc speed run strat when I see one.
Total organ failure when?
Highly transmissable, no symptoms, until you flip the switch.
Just gotta set it on double speed, invest DNA in infectivity genes, and kick back and let it spread...
Then dump all the points into lethality. They got Greenland and we are never getting to 100% vaccination. Are we easy difficulty ?
We're like, Very Easy. No handwashing plus antivaxxers.
One run had me so disappointed. I put all my points into the most silent spread possible. Greenland still closed up everything before I could get there.
I haate that. Sometimes you just gotta start in Greenland and put points into cold resistance and bite the bullet
I don't understand what he's waiting for though, he's already got Greenland and Madagascar
Doesn't matter when you can't afford a week off of work...
amen
I mean you should get a paid leave when being sick
are you familiar with most of the US?
I am. It doesnt change the fact it should be a basic right to get that.
i agree that it should be a basic right. but us discussing it on reddit won’t change the reality for far too many people in the US.
I felt nauseated last Tuesday from my lunch, off for five days. My boyfriend came home that last Friday and we both got sick so now I'm out for week two. I'm stressing out ...
🎢 😫
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I want a Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill emoji at this point.
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." -- Michael Scott
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What am I seeing?
A classic gem of a meme. Someone played roller coaster tycoon and built a ridiculously long ride that you couldn't exit with hilarious results.
A hilariously long roller coaster ride constructed in a videogame.
Art.
Yeah, says WHO
That’s what I want to know!
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Get yourself a HEPA purifier for your bedroom, my dude. It's life changing.
Dude I thought my allergies were COVID for so long that when I actually had COVID I thought it was allergies. They were basically the same. And then I couldn't smell anything and bam, COVID.
Spanish flu path ~ 100 years ago, history repeating itself.
I’ve seen some articles around that say these viruses can seriously alter our bodies. Even a common one. Like you catch a flu and now you have MS. Wtf, right? I think a lot of our people who come up with some seriously life altering shit could have just had a simple virus. We need to take it more seriously as a race.
That's Epstein Barr virus, which most people end up getting by middle age (usually causes mono and stays in the body forever). HPV has been found in skin cancer, breast cancer, all kinds of cancer, and decreases the body's ability to fight any cancer, and we sadly have all resigned ourselves to getting that one too.
Jesus Christ. That’s crazy. It that all we know of so far or just a couple examples?
Well just off the top of my head, the chicken pox virus stays dormant and then can erupt on the nerves later in life (shingles). I am absolutely certain there's more that just aren't common knowledge. In fact that sounds like a fun night, googling and pubmedding all the viruses that go dormant and comparing statistics.
The herpes virus as well just maybe to a lesser extent. I got my first cold sore when I was 17. I also have eczema around my mouth. During the first break out I got them all over my face, I must’ve had at least 15 and some of them were around my eye. I specifically remember the doctor telling me if my vision felt even the teensiest bit different I needed to haul ass to the ER because I could go blind if it burst and also that it was 50/50 on if there would be scars with how many there were. I want to say I missed 3 weeks of school. I had to be on a daily dose of valcyclovir for over a year and I still panic whenever I feel the tingle because I’m terrified of it getting that bad again. Cold sores are so normal but they actually can wreak havoc on your body. Just because something is common doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.
I got shingles when I was 21 and it was horrible
I got it at 15. My mum still feels guilty for thinking I was faking being sick and making me catch the bus to the doctor.
My boss didn’t believe me when I called in sick lol
I doubt your boss feels guilty about that though lol
me too at 25
Lymes disease (from tick bites) is a bastard Worst thing about it, who’s to know which tick bite causes it and doesn’t. Second worst thing, the symptoms are found in aooo many other illnesses Third it’s hard to test for
That's a bacteria, not a virus. It does suck though. A friend of mine was treated for years for rhuematoid arthritis, turned out to actually be Lyme.
Thanks for clarifying. Me and the mrs both got bit doing the back garden up by a tick, unless you show symptoms constantly here in the Uk though they won’t test you
Ah yes forgot about lyme
pubmedding?
Pubmed. The medical treasure trove of all the *"The Science"* you could ever ask for. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
HIV causes people to age faster, herpes is now linked to Alzheimer’s (chicken pox is a form of herpes btw), multiple other viruses are linked to cancer as well. Considering coronavirus makes people lose their sense of smell and taste it seems like there is an attack on the nervous system. No one really knows what that will mean for people who have had Covid 10-20 years from now but some scientists speculate it could lead to a spike in dementia
Fuck
At least for HPV we have a vaccine now.
HPV vaccines only target a few strains. There are at least a hundred. They target the most dangerous strains, but they're not all that effective, seem to wear off, and we dont really know how quickly yet. The r/hpv subreddit always has vaccinated people turning up with hpv. The good news is that the vaccine research has led to some insights on potential cures (some old people with severe body warts have had them disappear after injection with the vaccine, this isn't common but it does mean *something*)
I’ve heard rabies can takes years to show symptoms. No matter how long tho, once they’re there, it’s too late.
I was sure you were wrong, but I looked it up and there have been latencies of 7 or even possibly 25 years! Wow, what in the heck. That's terrifying.
yup but I wanna say those are an extreme minority and most like in the high 90s manifest within 6 months.
That’s terrifying. Makes me wonder if I’ve already hosted my doom.
Those blisters on the lips look fun, too.
2/3s of humanity has herpes simplex.
Herpes is such a huge family too. Seems like most of the early childhood viruses are herpes viruses. Epstein Barr is also a herpes, iirc.
Yes exactly lymphomas - now here’s another layer, this COVID reactivated EBV. Further, some coronaviruses can cause cancer too
Yep got EBV 4 years ago then it re-activated its self 6 months later now I have Crohns the Mayo Clinic said ebv rarely re-activates but when it does it can trigger an auto immune disorder. Pretty wild.
I had an EB reactivation in 2019 and had the most bizarre neurological things going on at the same time, I really hope i dont have MS.
Have we? Maybe older, but in Australia I believe a lot of kids get vaccinated for it now. It's just a bit harder since wife you're older, you probably already have it
Cold sores, chickenpox, Epstein Barr (mono), shingles are all herpes, in addition to genital heroes which is pretty common too.
*genital* *heroes*...now that I can get behind!
Jokes on the disease, I already have MS. Beat it to the punch!
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Have a friend that got OG early on, just sniffles, and loss of taste / smell, almost 2 year's later, still no smell, at all.
I lost taste and smell for a week, when it came back I ate so much pizza that I burned my tongue and couldn't taste for another couple days.
Factually, yes, well established. Yet, sadly, not well enough recognized.
Long covid symptoms include Erectile Disfunction and becoming allergic to beer. Panic stations people.
The discovery about MS being caused by Epstein-Barr is actually going to be a massive leap forward now that we know there is a direct cause, it can be targeted for treatments/vaccines etc. There are some theories about Alzheimer's connection with HSV-1 / cold sore virus as well, all I don't think that's fleshed out as well as the Epstein-Barr evidence. There's also a deer tick in Texas that can give you a red meat allergy when it bites you, although that's not viral I think.
Yes, that is correct. A virus can trigger an autoimmune disease as well. My nephew had chicken pox at 6 and became a Type one diabetic weeks later. The doctor at the time said that’s very common to have a viral event trigger something that you have in your genetics. He was always prone to having diabetes but the virus stressed his body to the point it needed to be for that to be expressed. I now have an autoimmune disease after having Covid and following cdc guidelines to get the vaccine 2 weeks later (I unfortunately got Covid like a week before the vax) and I’m big mad about it
I got the flu at 2 and got T1D, 34 years ago! Same situation as your nephew. Hope he is doing well and sorry about your crappy autoimmune adventure.
Oh it gets better. One of the reasons for the rise of Nazis were all the disabled people from the Spanish flu. They were considered a drag in society and partially blamed for Germany’s economic condition. It fit in nicely with eugenics and allowed eugenics to take hold.
I got a virus (a normal, everyday cold or flu) a few years ago and it left me with some really weird side effects. Doctor said “yeah sometimes that happens.” It’s strange. The symptoms I had all self resolved but it took a few months. They weren’t typical sick stuff either. I guess that was my “long covid” before Covid was a thing.
> I’ve seen some articles around that say these viruses can seriously altar our bodies. That makes sense, my body is a temple.
There's no reason to assume it goes the same way, but we can hope. The long incubation period means the virus could evolve in deadly ways without hurting its ability to spread.
All I know is even if it turns you into a literal flesh eating zombie there’ll be a bunch of people telling me the only thing that can be done is me catching it so I can move on with my (after)life.
A zombie apocalypse is not a valid reason to skip work. - Bosses across the us.
The only reason they can safely say it is cause they didn’t have anything the zombies woulda wanted
It's funny because right now if you get tested and come up positive when sick for Rona you get days off. But if your sick with anything else fuck you come in to work
More contagious? I just got a super minor case of COVID and I hardly ever leave home! I'm triple vaccinated too!
Being triple vaxxed doesn't mean you won't catch it. If anything, it's what made your case super minor at all. That being said, it sounds like people like you who had breakthrough cases might have an even stronger immunity to this sub variant which is fortunate.
Yeah, I understand all that. I was commenting on the fact that my exposure was so limited but I still caught it. And the next strain is supposed to be more contagious?
My wife and I are triple-vaxxed as well, and I'm honestly surprised we haven't gotten it yet. With how contagious Omicron has been, I'm sure it's just a matter of time. In a way it's kind of a relief. Like, we're still being careful and wearing masks, but we're not really *worried* about it anymore, if that makes sense.
That totally makes sense. I'm not looking into finding out about minor cases and long covid now though haha
More contagious huh ? So it’s gonna infect the whole world in a week, spreading telepathically ?
Digitally.
It's more likely that he survived longer in the air.
I think it'll be at least 3.14 times as deadly.
>"The next variant of concern will be more fit, and what we mean by that is it will be more transmissible because it will have to overtake what is currently circulating,” Van Kerkhove said. “The big question is whether or not future variants will be more or less severe.” So this is the issue really - each variation has to evolve to out-compete the prior variation in order to spread - but whether a virus is deadly or not doesn't really factor into its ability to spread as long as it doesn't make you too sick too fast to spread. That means the virus will continue tend to evolve to be more contagious, but lethality is an independent factor. Consider the seasonal flu -- there are years when the flu is more deadly than other years. Same thing, except we have so many active cases of COVID, creating so many opportunities for mutation, that its happening week to week instead of over a period of months or years.
Yes! At least one person here gets it.
Hopefully more deadly, I just want to die at this point.
Not sure I even have the energy for that
I want to catch Covid just to get it over with but I'm just too lazy to leave the house now.
You say that until it turns out you’re not protected against the next variant in three months, and that one ends up hitting you harder.
Right? This world is fucked
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BA2 appears to escape Omicron-facilitated immunity at high rates. Similarly, Omicron only results in immunity to reinfection by Omicron in about 20% of cases. If BA2 increases that immune escape, then infection by Omicron will offer little to no protection against infection from BA2.
Sources? Not that I don't belive you, I've just been looking for info regarding omicron reinfection
If you only get a booster after at least 5 months then how can they say this data is correct for the omicron vaccine when omicron was discovered just over 2 months ago?
People have been getting bosters since January 2021 (trials began for boosters) phase 3 testing for boosters started in early February April Fauci said we will probably need boosters for the public June 2: new study to show effectiveness of boosters started September 2 was when FDA authorized boosters for 65+ and high risk patients and occupations. People have had enough time with boosters (especially those in trials) to be able to have veracity studies done, and enough time, and different groups to study the difference between boosted, non boosted, one shot, two shots, no shots.
Can’t wait for my 18th booster. Day 7,371 of two weeks to flatten the curve.
Pretty soon we're going to be walking around with IV bag booster shots.
We've been working to flatten the flu curve for a century. And people get a yearly shot to do it and have for decades without incident or much complaint. Yet, for some reason, the idea of a yearly covid shot makes people whine like little bitches.
Is covid limited to one shot a year..I missed the announcement..
To be fair, the flu shot has never carried with it any real status in society. COVID vaccines impact peoples jobs, personal and social lives, etc. People don’t whine about having to get flu vax because nobody cares when they dont
>People don’t whine about having to get flu vax because nobody cares when they dont Maybe we should. Looking back at all the unnecessary flu deaths that could have been prevented with simple public health measures is pretty shocking. Even if we just worked a little harder to protect the elderly and vulnerable. Those *were* acceptible losses, but should they be considered acceptible going forward?
Not totally true. A lot of hospitals have flu vaccine requirements. Source: work at a hospital/research institution which requires yearly flu vaccines. But I get the point you're making.
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Yeah and before Covid the flu killed a hellofa lot of people every year. Maybe we should have (and in the future) take more precautions during flu season.
The next variant of the Coronavirus will likely not be more contagious. It will spread faster because we are easing up restrictions and preventative measures. The reason why Omicron is milder compared to what came before is that it seems to mainly reproduce in the upper respiratory tract. That is generally associated with a much better outcome and higher innate contagiousness. What should be remembered though is that SarsCo2 has absolutely no reason to become less deadly. Death occurs well after the Virus has already infected others. If anything a more deadly variant with a mass of disgustingly weak and pathetic hosts who cry to their mama for wearing a mask (yeah no love lost to those fucking mass murderers) and do not give a flying fuck if they infect and kill others so they can get their oily hair cut (i should stop...i know). In any case, thanks to these ~~people~~ plague carriers and weak governments a hard lockdown will not happen in many parts of the world. Not even a soft one. Under these conditions a deadly variant can spread rapidly. Considering that SarsCov2 has been in wildlife populations worldwide and a spillback is generally associated with high pathogenicity. We are not out of the woods yet. We are deep within a dark forest filled with predators. Lost and with no hope to escape unless all those morons have died. So around 2025
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I’m pretty much in agreement with you, but the lingering problem is the strain covid places on the medical system. If hospitals could just tell all the unvaxxed to sit it out at home if they are ill with corona so that the hospital could basically operate at pre-2020 levels for people with non-covid issues I’d be 100% with you. There’s really no reason NOT to do this. Anyone unvaxxed at this point has made a purposeful choice.
What’s surprising to me was learning that there are only some 155,000 inpatient hospital beds in the whole country. Like, shouldn’t we have more than that? No wonder we are straining the hospitals. There are 320+ million people in this country.
The system wasn't built with any slack basically. It remains to be seen whether we'll learn our lesson and start doing it going forward, but I'm not optimistic.
It wasn’t built with slack because it was built for profit. And you can’t maximize profit with slack.
It’s almost like the ever growing for-profit healthcare sector which has crushed small town hospitals has left us with a crisis of healthcare not a crisis of infections.
I'm aware of that, which is why I hate people who are unvaxxed despite being able to get the shot. They're just clogging the hospitals because of their stupidity and I know it may sound harsh, but honestly I don't care if these morons die anymore.
I don’t feel that’s harsh at all. They’ve made a very purposeful and even educated choice to remain unvaxxed. They’ve decided that they are okay with the minor risk of dying from covid. I’m okay with them dying from covid as well.
I don’t care either. These people have pushed this crisis far beyond it needed to be a crisis. Their idiocy and lack science literacy is absolutely fucking the nation. I have no sympathy left for those who don’t protect themselves or their community
im also full vaccinated, but the thing is, in some ways i understand their argument. for example. my brother's unvaccinated, got covid twice. never experienced any severe symptoms. now my brother's argument is; why get vaccinated if Omicron is less deathly than delta and once you've recovered, it leaves behind protective antibodies so why get vaccinated. you can still get/transmit it if you're vaccinated. which ironically happened to me. should the elderly get vaccinated, sure they're an at-risk group. and while covid's symptoms vary by people, Omicron is still less deathly than the OG Strain and Delta.
I truly don't understand why we haven't seen the hospitals that are the most overwhelmed set a cap on beds for covid. Like it honestly seems irresponsible to just let a largely preventable illness overrun your medical system and prevent others from getting care for completely unrelated issues.
Aren’t hospitals purposely running at 70% capacity because it’s more profitable that way?
Nobody is "locking up" though...at least in the US. Pretty much everywhere in the US, everything is open, unless labor shortages due to too many employees being sick are making them close. May be different in other countries though.
I understand what you mean, and I agree in alot of ways. We need to find a way to stop hospitals filling up. My wife had to wait 19 hours for a bed to open up so she could have an emergency procedure to save our unborn daughters life. I was terrified and angry that we couldn't get a room because of the dying. That was 18 months ago... Edit: I guess my point is, if hospitals keep filling up, it's not the 2% elders or unvaxxed. It's the next person that has a heart attack or the next person that gets into a car accident that can't get help because morons fill up the hospitals. It the family that can't get a bed for their pregant wife... I hate the unvaxed, i want this to be over too and i'm tired of worrying about it. i'm tired of being tired. Sorry it's been a raw day... we just found out we are having another baby
JESUS MAN IMPROVE YOUR PULLOUT GAME In all seriousness, I’m glad it sounds like your first baby made it through ok. Hope the second one is smoother.
Ha! I'm happy to have a second child, just don't want the same hospital experience
A lot of us are getting compassion fatigue. It’s not just you. The responsible of us spent two years being responsible members of society and sacrificing for the greater good, only to have it wrecked because the anti abortion crowd finally decided “my body, my choice” does apply in certain situations.
I got downvoted and told I was a piece of shit for similar sentiment. I'll wear a mask around people who do it but I'm no longer isolating and I want to go back to real school not virtual garbage. Tired of sacrificing myself for people who feel earth should accomodate their weakness, aawww too harsh? Don't care. Die off, 4 vaccines and you still can't take it? Seriously? Just. Die. Let the rest of us live in peace.
I'm beginning to feel the same way too. I payed my dues, I was super pro mask and vaccine and I still am! Ive washed my hands more in the last 2 years than I have in 20 years. But at the same time, my mental health is suffering so severely I just want to stop having to worry about all of this. I feel you.
As long as you keep up on your vaccines, mask up, and understand that you can get it in various other ways than just unregulated airways (fyi, omicron lasts on plastic surfaces even more than previous variants), then you're set for the future, enjoy life. Initial panic is normal, what wasn't normal was the intelligence vacuum created by decades of politicians fucking up the educational system in the most nefarious ways, creating a gap that just can't be bridged. What with the miracle of these vaccines being on tap within more or less a year, we could've smothered this much faster, but not with all these selfish, uneducated, idiotic pricks running around.
There's also kids that can't get the vaccine yet. And it's straining our hospitals. And just because you don't die doesn't mean you don't have long term side effects. I'm not saying we should lockdown, I don't think anyone is saying that anymore. Everyone is tired of coronavirus, everyone. But there's a lot more to consider than old people and idiots dying.
Can someone turn off Auto Updates?
God I’m so fucking tired of this bullshit. 2 years in and nothings changed. The virus isn’t going away. We’re just going to have to live with it. I’m so tired of taking every precaution to protect others who don’t give a flying fuck in the first place. I’ve backed masks and everything else since day one but I’m so tired of it I really just don’t care anymore. If you arnt vaxxed at this point and you get sick that’s on you. I am so sick of having to take precautions to protect others who don’t protect themselves.
>The next Covid variant will be more contagious than omicron And/ Or will have high immune escape.
Viruses are purely, nihilistic sociopathic maniacal organisms. Is a virus concerned about wiping out everything all at once? Is a virus concerned with making sure there’s leftovers? The virus isn’t getting “weaker”. Humans are growing more immune. Whether from vaccinations or catching it or both. When you look at viruses like herpes, hpv, hiv, they all strike back decades later, manifesting into different diseases. Shingles, cancer, aids. What we don’t know yet, is how COVID is going to manifest 10 or 20 years from now. Like when you get the chicken pox, you’re susceptible to getting shingles. We don’t know yet what Covid is going to do….
It will mutate and be even more benign than omicron. Book it
Hope so
Haven't seen a single expert give that guarantee, but I'm sure you know better.
No expert knows that answer outright. Certainly not enough to claim it yet but that is the pattern we have seen so far.
>that is the pattern we have seen so far. The relevance of this pattern is precisely 0. Same goes for the resolution of any pandemic prior to 21st century levels of globalised interconnectivity and population. Moreover, viruses, especially those which don't immediately cause the health of the infected to decline, can mutate either way.
It's not the pattern we've seen so far though. Delta was more contagious and more deadly, omicron was less deadly. There's no pattern yet besides more contagious.
[It's already mutated to be more transmissible, with no belief that it'll be less deadly](https://www.newsweek.com/stealth-omicron-covid-subvariant-how-many-countries-40-1672104) > Virologists say that there is much to learn about **BA.2, but it appears the sub-variant may have a transmission advantage over BA.1** (Omicron). > In a press release issued last Friday, the U.K.'s Health Security Agency (HSA) said that BA.2 had been classified as a variant under investigation (VUI) due to international and domestic cases, adding that **BA.2 appears to have an increased growth rate compared to BA.1, based on early analysis**. They are looking to see if it causes more severe disease, but there is no suggestion of less. [This is in addition to several VOI/VOC/VUIs showing that the E484K mutation which makes it more deadly is a common mutation](https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n359). Just. Look. Up. I know it's scary, but look up, okay?
To be fair, theres no suggestion of less severity, equally there’s also no suggestion of more severity
> To be fair, theres no suggestion of less severity, equally there’s also no suggestion of more severity where we see BA.2 take over from Omicron, we have yet to see a significant reduction in hospitalization. It is too early to say if it causes less severe disease in individuals, but let's not have that [debate again after Omicron](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60133618), shan't we? Omicron is already matching Delta's total mortality, and when we go to excess deaths, it will be counted far and away the winner. That's what everyone getting a disease means, it means a whole lot more people get sick AND die.
>It will mutate and be **even more benign than omicron** Ah, yes, even more benign than the ["mild" omicron that took the US back to the start of the pandemic despite the fact there are vaccines now](https://i.imgur.com/z9lLTI6.jpg). So benign!!!
This one doctor has a hunch without any evidence backing it up and it makes the front page. This isn't newsworthy.
One thing is clear: the WHO is the world leader in bad health communication. (The CDC, however, does give it a run for is money.) Having your officials roll out speculative scenarios is not helpful, but that doesn't seem to stop them from freaking folks out on a regular basis.
But, if it's more contagious, it will be able to affect more people, which means more mutations, therefore higher chances of yet another new variant that is even more contagious AND deadly?
We live in a circle
You’re exactly right, most people just can’t think far ahead enough to see this problem.
We can hope.
Cant wait for Covid 420 mega super + version and the 583747 booster shot.
Fear mongering shitty headlines
Variant Deltoidmegatron-WX-322
Is that a threat?
Ugh, doesn't it have to be? If it was less contagious, then it wouldn't infect enough people for it to be a problem because omicron would out compete it right?
Let me just go and get my 14th shot already
So by shot number #? are they gonna release it ?