3 ms·
Will COVID-19 become another cold? Were the 4 other coronaviruses that cause colds just as deadly when they first appeared? Interesting to ponder.
by LordHumungous 7y ago
Will COVID-19 become another cold? Were the 4 other coronaviruses that cause colds just as deadly when they first appeared? Interesting to ponder.
- hdjrork 7y agoPossibly, but it will take many years for this to happen.
- bobosha 7y agoActually yes. The virus that caused the 1918 "Spanish flu" is now one of the seasonal flu viruses that afflict us every year.
- echelon 7y agoIt doesn't seem like there's much evolutionary pressure given both the estimated R0 and the asymptomatic transmission to make this disease learn to become less deadly. It transmits just fine despite killing people. I suppose our immune systems will just get better at learning about it (similar epitopes) as we continue to be exposed year after year.
- snapetom 7y agoPossible. A pre-print paper from 3 weeks ago describes how the researchers already found a large deletion in populations in Singapore. The authors theorize that the virus is sacrificing strength in order to keep up the infection rate. The same deletion also occurred in SARS and MERS, effectively ending their runs. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987222v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987222v1....