6 ms·
If it does become endemic, the question is, what disease would it cause? The deadly Spanish and Hong Kong flu viruses didn't disappear, but rather evolved to ca
by rich_sasha 6y ago
If it does become endemic, the question is, what disease would it cause? The deadly Spanish and Hong Kong flu viruses didn't disappear, but rather evolved to cause yet-another seasonal flu after a few seasons.
If the Covid virus does the same and causes yet-another-cold, who cares? Whereas if we're fighting Covid-the-disease for decades to come, well, God help us!
- guscost 6y agoThere is plenty of evidence to support the idea that as it becomes endemic, it will evolve toward yet-another-cold. There is no evidence in all of history for an endemic coronavirus that is not yet-another-cold. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006215 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4361674/#!po=0.555556 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4361674/#!po=0.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873896/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873896/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC136581/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC136581/
- johnchristopher 6y agoI am clueless but I'd like to ask: when you say "it will evolve toward yet-another-cold"... does it mean it'll be as harmless as the common cold or as common as the common cold but as dangerous as covid19 ?
- rusk 6y agoBenign enough to spread without concern
- Cactus2018 6y agoOf the ~200 common colds, 4 are known coronaviruses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Viruses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Viruses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Infection_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Infection_in_human...
- hyko 6y agoWhy stop fighting when it becomes just a cold? The common cold costs billions (not to mention making people miserable).
- simonh 6y agoPlease don't do that. Nobody said not to fight it, we do fight colds already, it just wouldn't be news anymore. Did you know there are four coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms? I didn't, because I didn't really care. That's all Op is saying.
- lostdog 6y agoIf we had invested more in developing vaccines and treatments for the common cold, then maybe we would have tricks that would have helped us beat covid faster.
- skim_milk 6y agoI think that's a common misconception here. Common cold viruses are very frequent targets of research - not with the end goal of creating an actual vaccine for a specific cold virus but for covering blind spots in our insight and processes that can be weaponized to create a vaccine when an outbreak happens. I'd say that our system is working - developing several working vaccines for a novel virus in under a year is pretty darn impressive.
- simonh 6y agoEspecially considering several of the actual vaccine candidates were developed in low single digit months, it's the evaluation production and testing that's taking most of the time.
- dividedbyzero 6y agoI'm not aware of a single working Covid-19 vaccine, which ones would that be? There are promising candidates, sure, but I don't think any have already been shown to be both effective and safe, which I'd say is required for one to be working, on the timescales that are needed, and I wouldn't know how one might do that so quickly. The current forerunners might well not work out, though I hope at least one of them will work, but my understanding is that anything immunity-related is fiendishly hard.
- anotheryou 6y agoCan someone explain? It basically self selects for survivability because living people spread better? And if so, how does the old strand die out in our world?
- rusk 6y agoIf it’s too severe the hosts take mitigation strategies which reduce the spread
- rich_sasha 6y agoI think roughly this, but it is a bit more complex. Basically, mutations of the virus that cause it to spread more make it more likely for the strain to persist. Usually this means, virus becomes more benign, doesn’t kill people quickly and instead causes some minor illness, which gives the patient more opportunities to spread it. But it’s not a given. It could for example mutate to become more deadly, but with a longer infectious period. This is what happened to myxomatosis in rabbits in Australia.
- ry454 6y agoEh.. this will cost me some reputation points on HN, but I have to say this. Why "Spanish flu" and not H1N1-A-18? That flu is called "Spanish" only because Spain's newspapers openly talked about the epidemic. The actual origin, according to wikipedia, was "likely Kansas".
- wezen 6y agoBecause by now everyone knows it as "Spanish flu". If you say H1N1-A-18, almost nobody would know what you're talking about.
- ry454 6y agoLuckily, we won't have this problem with "SARS-CoV-2".
- rv-de 6y agoyou mean the china virus?
- newhacker2719 6y agoNo, they mean the Kung Flu.
- atomi 6y agoProbably the most awesome thing about the internet in my opinion is that you can look stuff up if you don't know what someone is talking about.