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No need to bring in animals to explain this. There are a handful of human coronaviruses - I think 4 that are not SARS-related, but I’m on mobile so will have to

No need to bring in animals to explain this. There are a handful of human coronaviruses - I think 4 that are not SARS-related, but I’m on mobile so will have to dig up the study later. Besides, once a virus jumps from an animal it either becomes a human virus (capable of spreading), or somehow is a one-off virus that can jump from animal->human but not subsequently to another human. If the latter, that effect is so negligible it would not explain 20-50% of SARS-CoV-2-naive individuals having t cell reactivity. —- While I’m at it, just a reminder to all that SARS-2 overall is a fairly mild virus, and the level of hysteria and death-inducing counterproductive response (lockdown, suspension of elective surgeries like Newsom did for a month here in California) is completely divorced from the fundamentals of this virus. Also a reminder that unlike flu, SARS-2 primarily kills the very old / very unhealthy, whereas flu kills the very young and the very old. Thus when you run the math on population dynamics / herd immunity, the recurring yearly deaths will be vanishingly low (unlike flu) and thus amortized across years, SARS-2 is even leas deadly than the current numbers imply. This is because once it has passed through the population, the set of SARS-CoV-2 naive individuals becomes dominated by new entrants to the world (babies/toddlers) who essentially have 0 risk of dying from COVID (it’s basically a rounding error). Thus while SARS-CoV-2 is and will remain endemic (circulating in the population), it will barely kill anyone once the current world population is largely exposed to it. — Finally, a reminder that mentioning stuff like the above tends to result in censorship from social media platforms, which combined with the incredible bias of “news” organizations like CNN etc, means that those who are plugged into the matrix will never encounter real information about this threat. And surprisingly (although in retrospect it shouldn’t have been surprising to me), there are a lot of people on HN that have dranken that very kool-aid and thus will reactively downvote or even flag commenters who present their beliefs (however founded or unfounded) about the true danger of this virus versus its purported impact. Also, since I’m already ranting, I just want to throw out that the narrative around “long-term damage” (often stated to be lifelong) is completely unfounded and contradicted by the research we already have about SARS-1, which is SARS-2’s much more deadly yet much less popular older brother.

berdon 6y ago
> Thus while SARS-CoV-2 is and will remain endemic (circulating in the population), it will barely kill anyone once the current world population is largely exposed to it. You mean once _all_ the people who could die from it, have died from it?
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Once all the people who exist today, yes. I anticipated this response of yours. It sounds like a great gotcha in its surface, until you realize that every fast-spreading respiratory virus works like that. It's happened with every flu pandemic, including the recent H1N1. SARS-CoV-2 appears to be an incredible spreader and a poor killer. What that means is the cost of perpetually trying to avoid infection are very high, whereas the benefits (avoided mortality) are quite low. Case in point, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits a fairly high degree of pre-symptomatic spread. I believe that this is almost certainly due to the findings of interferon-mediated early-course immunosuppression (read: in the early days of infection it prevents your immune system from reacting strongly, meaning that unlike many other diseases there is a period where you have enough viral load to spread it yet don't express symptoms). Also note that it does not exhibit asymptomatic spread, which would be even "worse" since pre-symptomatic spread only gives you a window of maybe days whereas asymptomatic is by definition across the whole disease course. Now factor in the fact that many people are either completely asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic (few symptoms). For those people, which may even be the majority of cases, it's such a not-big-deal that most don't ever realize they've had it. Some will have more of an actual cold, and some will have symptoms comparable to a run-of-the-mill flu. A small fraction of those infected will go on to experience increasingly severe symptoms, probably comparable to a normal SARS-1 infection (since SARS-1 is quite nasty), culminating in the worst cases in the need for invasive ventilation at which point death is incredibly difficult to avoid. (This is obviously an area of active research but it appears that the severe form of the disease is related to a state of immune disregulation where pathological cytokine release syndrome, the tissue damage from widespread neutrophil infiltration, etc wreak havoc). So, we have a virus that spreads incredibly well, yet is overall incredibly mild, and has very well-defined populations who are at real risk of severe outcomes. That is precisely the type of virus that is a horrible candidate for lockdown, which damages the entire society in the attempt to prevent what is perceived as a greater threat (but is actually not, in my opinion). So, as a society we saw a papercut and chopped off our hand. Oops. I am happy to provide sources for pre-symptomatic spread, interferon-mediated immunosuppresion, etc, but first I wanted to make sure that you were here to engage in good faith dialogue; i.e. whether I can convince you or not, you are actually willing to read (or try to read) the papers. I'm a bit scarred by numerous times (here and elsewhere) where I've invested a bunch of time into detailed posts and then quickly realized that the person on the other end was never serious about addressing the problem of SARS-2 but instead was there to toe the party line and reinforce their pre-existing conclusions.

berdon 6y ago

> Thus while SARS-CoV-2 is and will remain endemic (circulating in the population), it will barely kill anyone once the current world population is largely exposed to it. You mean once _all_ the people who could die from it, have died from it?

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Once all the people who exist today, yes. I anticipated this response of yours. It sounds like a great gotcha in its surface, until you realize that every fast-spreading respiratory virus works like that. It's happened with every flu pandemic, including the recent H1N1. SARS-CoV-2 appears to be an incredible spreader and a poor killer. What that means is the cost of perpetually trying to avoid infection are very high, whereas the benefits (avoided mortality) are quite low. Case in point, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits a fairly high degree of pre-symptomatic spread. I believe that this is almost certainly due to the findings of interferon-mediated early-course immunosuppression (read: in the early days of infection it prevents your immune system from reacting strongly, meaning that unlike many other diseases there is a period where you have enough viral load to spread it yet don't express symptoms). Also note that it does not exhibit asymptomatic spread, which would be even "worse" since pre-symptomatic spread only gives you a window of maybe days whereas asymptomatic is by definition across the whole disease course. Now factor in the fact that many people are either completely asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic (few symptoms). For those people, which may even be the majority of cases, it's such a not-big-deal that most don't ever realize they've had it. Some will have more of an actual cold, and some will have symptoms comparable to a run-of-the-mill flu. A small fraction of those infected will go on to experience increasingly severe symptoms, probably comparable to a normal SARS-1 infection (since SARS-1 is quite nasty), culminating in the worst cases in the need for invasive ventilation at which point death is incredibly difficult to avoid. (This is obviously an area of active research but it appears that the severe form of the disease is related to a state of immune disregulation where pathological cytokine release syndrome, the tissue damage from widespread neutrophil infiltration, etc wreak havoc). So, we have a virus that spreads incredibly well, yet is overall incredibly mild, and has very well-defined populations who are at real risk of severe outcomes. That is precisely the type of virus that is a horrible candidate for lockdown, which damages the entire society in the attempt to prevent what is perceived as a greater threat (but is actually not, in my opinion). So, as a society we saw a papercut and chopped off our hand. Oops. I am happy to provide sources for pre-symptomatic spread, interferon-mediated immunosuppresion, etc, but first I wanted to make sure that you were here to engage in good faith dialogue; i.e. whether I can convince you or not, you are actually willing to read (or try to read) the papers. I'm a bit scarred by numerous times (here and elsewhere) where I've invested a bunch of time into detailed posts and then quickly realized that the person on the other end was never serious about addressing the problem of SARS-2 but instead was there to toe the party line and reinforce their pre-existing conclusions.