4 ms·

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are a few permutations of case, dashes etc. My wife presented with symptoms quit

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are a few permutations of case, dashes etc. My wife presented with symptoms quite similar to covid-19 to A&E (UK: A&E ~= ER) after a cruise we went on in late November. She has never smoked but she did get quite breathless and shook it off after about a week. As you say, there are a lot of anecdotes. A decent antibody test would be nice but at the moment we don't know enough about how the bloody thing works. Even if you have detectable antibodies after an infection, does that mean you have any immunity to another infection and if so, for how long? My money is on this thing turning into another 'flu after about five years. It will stop killing large numbers of people and evolve into a sort of status quo, just like the seasonal 'flus. It will still be a killer but not quite so aggressive as it is now. It is not as aggressive a killer as Ebola but it spreads far easier. Evolution will ensure that it will find a "happy" medium where it can carry on spreading but we don't still feel the need to eradicate it because we can live with the consequences of the adjusted version. My language in the above para is a bit off but the sentiment is the same. We happily jump into cars every day (not so much now) and kill ourselves and others in pretty large numbers across the world but that is judged an acceptable risk. covid-19 will simply become another one eventually. For now, it is a right old shit show and we do not understand the enemy at all well. We do not know how to live with it. We will.

jeromegv 7y ago
"Evolution", evolution takes multiple generations, we won't "evolve" to deal with that anytime soon. There's no reason it will be less of a killer for people that get infected. What we can do is as you say, for now, learn to live with it, and hope for a vaccine.
- foota 7y ago
  They mean the virus itself. Viruses that are too lethal can't spread as effectively because they cripple the host and are easily detected. This creates selective pressure for viruses which mutate to be less lethal to spread more widely. If the less lethal virus confers immunity to the more lethal version then the lethal version is likely to die off, or at least become less prominent.
  - gerdesj 7y ago
    Nicely put. This is not a message that any politician can ever espouse. It is sadly the way of things. I suspect that the next novel coronavirus will meet with quite a lot of resistance. It seems we screwed the pooch/jumped the shark/fucked up ... with SARS which was our last warning apart from Bird flu (H5N1) and the other horrendous epidemics and pandemics across the years. It's a bit embarrassing to have several world class virus killer orgs here in the UK and yet we are only deploying them properly fairly recently. You Yanks can stop sniggering at the back - you've screwed up in the same way we have. It is of course not that simple and we are all unprepared for this. It will be different next time and there will be a next time. All countries are changing visibly with their response to this thing. It is remarkable and quite humbling. Keep your eyes peeled and your brain on point and observe. We will never see the like again in our lifetimes (I hope) My take away is that we need to get all our govts onboard with real risk assessment.
    - groby_b 7y ago
      We were not "all unprepared for this". That's a bullshit line by incompetent politicians who deliberately dismantled the very systems that were put in place to deal with this. As for warnings: By end of December, the epi community knew something was up. By mid January, there was a pretty loud clamor that we need to address this.By end of January, Covid was a regular occurrence in the intelligence briefing for the president, and the warnings weren't exactly ambiguous. By mid February, anybody who was paying actual attention was preparing one way or another. As for warning the general public: Bill Gates did a whole song and dance on a TED stage. We had SARS, and Mers, and swine flu. So, no, we are not "all unprepared". Many closed their eyes and pretended wishing extra-hard makes science go away. And yes, there's a good chance we'll see another one in our lifetime. As we encroach more and more on animal habitats, it's pretty inevitable. (That, too, is a thing people have been warning about for decades)
      - Sideloader 7y ago
        Well put. A lot of people miss this fact. Also, the US/UK trying to pin the blame for their own incompetence on China suggests that reality attachment in these places, at the government level at any rate, is seriously sub-optimal. In the US, the Trump administration’s bungling incompetence handling of the outbreak is truly staggering. Wildly contradictory statements from moment to the next, no coordinated pandemic plan, “hijacking” PPE shipments enroute from China and Malaysia to the countries that had bought, and paid for, them...this is rogue/failed state level stuff. Other western countries also messed up big time. In Canada, France, the UK and Spain people in longterm care homes were abandoned and left wallowing in their own filth as COVID-19 burned through these facilities like wildfire, killing scores of elderly inpatients, many of whom were left to suffer and die alone. It’s striking how some of the most “advanced” countries utterly failed to prepare for and manage a very foreseeable pandemic. Then again, is it really that surprising that this happened in places where health care systems have been chronically underfunded for decades as permanent homeless camps have become normalized and the middle-class economy replaced by low-wage precarity and easy credit? It’s like after four decades of “there is no such thing as society” governance the health and well-being of people, of the public, in these places has become an afterthought. The scramble to blame other countries or pretend that “there is nothing we could have done to prepare for this” is theatre designed to deflect attention from the fact that dictatorships, like China, and places with authoritarian governments, like Singapore and South Korea, care more for the health of their citizens than many of the western liberal democracies, where austerity and massive neglect of public services and infrastructure have become the norm. Like the market crash of 2008, the coronavirus outbreak of 2020 is showing that the social and economic system underpinning the west is seriously broken and can’t handle even the slightest amount of stress. It needs to be replaced with an arrangement that reins in the ability of the avaricious banker and CEO class to dictate how the economy should be run. The health and well-being of all people in society needs to come first or these places will degrade even further.
- gerdesj 7y ago
  [It gets on my tits when people downvote a reasoned opinion - jeromegv is having a chat with me and a lot of other people. He is not being rude or offensive, just having a chat and espousing an opinion] I didn't mean we will evolve. The virus will be doing the evolving. We live for years, this virus "lives" for days.
skwb 7y ago
We already know that SARS-COV-1 IGG antibodies last ~3 years [1]. FWIW antibodies doesn't prevent you from getting sick- there's plenty of studies for the influenza vaccine that show it helps with severity of disease as well in some individuals [2]. I would much rather have a "really bad cold" again then get full COVID-19. Bigger questions around viral shedding after having immunity, but I would almost certainly imagine much less. [1]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ [2]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28525597 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28525597
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  > We already know that SARS-COV-1 IGG antibodies last ~3 years As far as I'm aware, this does not tell us that it'll be the same for SARS-CoV-2. Maybe it makes it more likely, but that's not the same as knowing for sure.
gpderetta 7y ago
> SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. it is very simple to remember: the one named after the disease is the virus, the one named after the virus is the disease. /facepalm.

jeromegv 7y ago

"Evolution", evolution takes multiple generations, we won't "evolve" to deal with that anytime soon. There's no reason it will be less of a killer for people that get infected. What we can do is as you say, for now, learn to live with it, and hope for a vaccine.

foota 7y ago
They mean the virus itself. Viruses that are too lethal can't spread as effectively because they cripple the host and are easily detected. This creates selective pressure for viruses which mutate to be less lethal to spread more widely. If the less lethal virus confers immunity to the more lethal version then the lethal version is likely to die off, or at least become less prominent.
- gerdesj 7y ago
  Nicely put. This is not a message that any politician can ever espouse. It is sadly the way of things. I suspect that the next novel coronavirus will meet with quite a lot of resistance. It seems we screwed the pooch/jumped the shark/fucked up ... with SARS which was our last warning apart from Bird flu (H5N1) and the other horrendous epidemics and pandemics across the years. It's a bit embarrassing to have several world class virus killer orgs here in the UK and yet we are only deploying them properly fairly recently. You Yanks can stop sniggering at the back - you've screwed up in the same way we have. It is of course not that simple and we are all unprepared for this. It will be different next time and there will be a next time. All countries are changing visibly with their response to this thing. It is remarkable and quite humbling. Keep your eyes peeled and your brain on point and observe. We will never see the like again in our lifetimes (I hope) My take away is that we need to get all our govts onboard with real risk assessment.
  - groby_b 7y ago
    We were not "all unprepared for this". That's a bullshit line by incompetent politicians who deliberately dismantled the very systems that were put in place to deal with this. As for warnings: By end of December, the epi community knew something was up. By mid January, there was a pretty loud clamor that we need to address this.By end of January, Covid was a regular occurrence in the intelligence briefing for the president, and the warnings weren't exactly ambiguous. By mid February, anybody who was paying actual attention was preparing one way or another. As for warning the general public: Bill Gates did a whole song and dance on a TED stage. We had SARS, and Mers, and swine flu. So, no, we are not "all unprepared". Many closed their eyes and pretended wishing extra-hard makes science go away. And yes, there's a good chance we'll see another one in our lifetime. As we encroach more and more on animal habitats, it's pretty inevitable. (That, too, is a thing people have been warning about for decades)
    - Sideloader 7y ago
      Well put. A lot of people miss this fact. Also, the US/UK trying to pin the blame for their own incompetence on China suggests that reality attachment in these places, at the government level at any rate, is seriously sub-optimal. In the US, the Trump administration’s bungling incompetence handling of the outbreak is truly staggering. Wildly contradictory statements from moment to the next, no coordinated pandemic plan, “hijacking” PPE shipments enroute from China and Malaysia to the countries that had bought, and paid for, them...this is rogue/failed state level stuff. Other western countries also messed up big time. In Canada, France, the UK and Spain people in longterm care homes were abandoned and left wallowing in their own filth as COVID-19 burned through these facilities like wildfire, killing scores of elderly inpatients, many of whom were left to suffer and die alone. It’s striking how some of the most “advanced” countries utterly failed to prepare for and manage a very foreseeable pandemic. Then again, is it really that surprising that this happened in places where health care systems have been chronically underfunded for decades as permanent homeless camps have become normalized and the middle-class economy replaced by low-wage precarity and easy credit? It’s like after four decades of “there is no such thing as society” governance the health and well-being of people, of the public, in these places has become an afterthought. The scramble to blame other countries or pretend that “there is nothing we could have done to prepare for this” is theatre designed to deflect attention from the fact that dictatorships, like China, and places with authoritarian governments, like Singapore and South Korea, care more for the health of their citizens than many of the western liberal democracies, where austerity and massive neglect of public services and infrastructure have become the norm. Like the market crash of 2008, the coronavirus outbreak of 2020 is showing that the social and economic system underpinning the west is seriously broken and can’t handle even the slightest amount of stress. It needs to be replaced with an arrangement that reins in the ability of the avaricious banker and CEO class to dictate how the economy should be run. The health and well-being of all people in society needs to come first or these places will degrade even further.
gerdesj 7y ago
[It gets on my tits when people downvote a reasoned opinion - jeromegv is having a chat with me and a lot of other people. He is not being rude or offensive, just having a chat and espousing an opinion] I didn't mean we will evolve. The virus will be doing the evolving. We live for years, this virus "lives" for days.

skwb 7y ago

We already know that SARS-COV-1 IGG antibodies last ~3 years [1]. FWIW antibodies doesn't prevent you from getting sick- there's plenty of studies for the influenza vaccine that show it helps with severity of disease as well in some individuals [2]. I would much rather have a "really bad cold" again then get full COVID-19. Bigger questions around viral shedding after having immunity, but I would almost certainly imagine much less. [1]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ [2]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28525597 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28525597

jamesrcole 7y ago
> We already know that SARS-COV-1 IGG antibodies last ~3 years As far as I'm aware, this does not tell us that it'll be the same for SARS-CoV-2. Maybe it makes it more likely, but that's not the same as knowing for sure.

gpderetta 7y ago

> SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. it is very simple to remember: the one named after the disease is the virus, the one named after the virus is the disease. /facepalm.