Citation, please. https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/doctors-around-world-say-covid-19-losing-its-potency-becoming-less https://justthenews.co

Citation, please. https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/doctors-around-world-say-covid-19-losing-its-potency-becoming-less https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/doctors-... Quoting the article, and if you go there, there are numerous links to the actual studies: Some physicians and scientists in the United States have lately also announced findings that the disease is getting weaker. One of them, Donald Yealy—the chair of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—claims that "some patterns [of COVID-19] suggest the potency is diminished." "The virus may be changing," he said earlier this week, adding that fewer people in the Pittsburgh area are contracting the disease, and the infections themselves appear weaker. Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, told media after Yealy's remarks that neither the virus's transmissibility nor its severity have diminished as Yealy claimed. Yet several other American scientists, including some at Arizona State University, announced findings in May that could bolster claims that the virus is less deadly than it once was. The scientists at ASU said that they had detected a gene deletion in one sample from several hundred Arizona patients that potentially reduced the fitness of the disease. Notably, they claimed it was similar to a deleted sequence observed in the 2003 SARS virus that was observed near the end of that disease's epidemic—possibly signaling that COVID-19 may be bound for a similar fate. Those conclusions were echoed by scientists in Spain this week, who proposed that COVID-19 may have adopted what the researchers call a "don't burn down the house" strategy, "reducing the severity of the infection and tissue damage without losing transmission capability." In effect, the disease could be opting to become less lethal so that it can spread more easily—a hallmark of evolutionary behavior, and also a boon for anyone who gets infected with the milder strain. Data do appear to indicate that the virus may be losing its edge. The statistics website Worldometers, for instance, shows an unmistakably lopsided trend: Though the number of confirmed global cases has been increasing since the start of the pandemic, the number of global deaths has been trending downward since mid-April. If that pattern holds, it may point to the conclusion that these few skeptical doctors are correct: That the coronavirus, like SARS before it, will eventually burn out in part due to its own viral mechanisms, without the need for a vaccine or for lockdown measures that have slowed the global economy.