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“It should make us worry,” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published on Thursday in the jo

• _jal 5y ago
  > Seems like we've survived this many times as a species I'm reasonably sure the species will survive climate change. Some nation states, civilizations and cultures' odds look more iffy. I think your bar for worry may be a bit higher than mine.
  • e40 5y ago
    And specifically about a pandemic, even if 50% of humans died in it the species would continue, but that would very much be something to worry about. Even at much lower percentages it would be worrying. Or the fact that it could continue for generations.
    • chiefalchemist 5y ago
      Fact it could continue? Or opinion it could continue? There's a significant difference. The latter is not science.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • kcartlidge 5y ago
        The comment (as you quoted) was: "Fact it could continue". Given that nobody knows with certainty that it can't, it is very much "fact" and not "opinion" that it could continue.
  • zamalek 5y ago
    Yeah, it's like surviving falling from an airplane. You technically survive, but life will be extremely different.
    • luhn 5y ago
      TIL you can likely survive a landing at terminal velocity just by orienting yourself feet-first and bending your knees.
      • outside1234 5y ago
        And probably ending up being unable to walk. That's what the OP is getting at.
        • Sebb767 5y ago
          Well, to be fair, you'll be unable to walk either way.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • cosmie 5y ago
    It's not the climate change that'll get us, but each other. Left to nature alone, we'd likely evolve and adapt and survive in some form or fashion. But the advancement of humanity has led to all kinds of ways we could do ourselves in if we put our minds to it. And those nation states and civilizations facing iffy odds aren't likely to go down quietly. In the throws of desperation, all bets are off (why care about stuff like MAD[1] when you're already facing imminent destruction by nature). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
• subsubzero 5y ago
  I think whats going on here are people are fatigued with covid related news and in the news in general. News publications are terrified and putting out these scaremongering stories to get people hooked again. Just like the 1917/1918 swine flu didn't last for "generations"(meaning the potency of the virus was extremely deadly) this covid virus will do the same. It will def. be around but not in the same potency as when it entered the world stage late 2019.
  • f6v 5y ago
    The last thing we should do is to be laid back about this or next viruses. If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed.
    • nomel 5y ago
      > If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed. I don't think we can use the luck we had with this vaccine to justify risky releases in the future.
      • f6v 5y ago
        The 5-10 year drug development cycle isn’t something that should stay that way forever. It’s incredibly slow and we should change that.
        • Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
          If it's anything like the normal vaccine development cycle, most of that time is consumed by things like writing grant proposals, waiting for grants, convincing a drug company and/or their convincing themselves it's worth taking the risk to try our your drug candidate, etc. COVID-19 vaccine development in the US and U.K. shows what you can do when people are willing to take huge gambles on a candidate ever working out, including starting mass production before Phase III trials produce strong evidence. The US Operation Warp Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed made a huge bet on Sanofi/GSK's vaccine, which in its first trial did not produce sufficient immunity in elderly, the second set of trials that started earlier this year are very promising so far. Ditto AZ/Oxford which has not applied for an Emergency Use Authorization. Novavax's vaccine also looks very good, but they are getting severely delayed in making an application because supplies for cell culture manufacturing are first going to the Serum Institute of India and AZ for Oxford's vaccine and Janssen, and there are some supplies common with the mRNA vaccines. Trained workers are also in short supply. Operation Warp Speed is a fantastic success in using the style of the Manhattan Project including paying Pfizer in advance for 100 million doses of BioNTech's vaccine, but so far only 2 of its 5 huge billion dollar plus upfront bets have paid off. Outside of an emergency that would be considered an unacceptable waste of money.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  To your point: "...who led the study and is now seeking notoriety and additional funding..." While I hate to sound like a cynic, this is the human side of science time and again. The fact that too many "journalists" don't recognize the context only makes matters worse. To that I'll editorialize and add, key word "might." Such unsubstantiated hyperbol only makes the source even more suspect.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  > Should it though? Fuck no. I'm really tired of these stories. (this is all directed at the author that put that "it should make us worry" quote in the NYT piece, not at any HN poster, but I really need to vent) The 1918 pandemic turned into seasonal influenza one we had enough herd immunity, enough people had T-cells that recognized H1N1 and the virus was forced into making sacrificial choices in order to spread. This virus will not achieve an escape mutation that puts us back to square one with vaccinated or recovered people at the same risk everyone was at in 2019. If you look at what happened in 2009 the H1 envelope protein of that virus traces its lineage back to the 1918 pandemic, it spent 50 years mutating in pigs before it jumped back to humans (that is a LOT of generations of fucking "variants") and people who were born and exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 when it was endemic to the human race had cross reactive T-cells which protected them. They still got infected, but the disease burden was vastly lower so that pandemic fizzled: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21653752/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21653752/ The human immune system isn't a binary on/off switch, and while circulating neutralizing antibodies are the gold standard of immunity they are far from the entire story. If you want to read an article supporting the idea that the coronavirus will transition to milder endemicity without all the irritated swearing read this: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741 And everyone can fuck off in advance about the idea that ADE will happen. If it was going to happen it would have already happened and this isn't Dengue: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/12/antibody-dependent-enhancement-and-the-coronavirus-vaccines https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/12/an... All the fucking headlines about how 99% of the people who are dying now are unvaccinated are screaming out that there's no fucking ADE anywhere to be found. People still talking about ADE need to see a psychiatrist to deal with their addiction to doom and gloom. This pandemic is ending. I'm 2 months post vaccination and everyone I'm in close contact with is vaccinated, so its pretty much entirely over for me. Now I need a fucking snickers bar.
  • noduerme 5y ago
    "If you look at what happened in 2019 the H1 envelope protein..." was that date a typo?
    • 5y ago
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Yeah, I didn't quite understand why it should make us worry. We do have a lot more tools at our disposal than people had 20,000 years ago - vaccines, antivirals (in a few years), knowing to social distance, etc.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Population density, commercial air travel. Social distancing is something that people even now are loathe to engage in, fortunately more and more people 'get it' but there are still plenty that do not. Arguably that's Darwin at work, but still.
    • murgindrag 5y ago
      Population is the big one. 7 billion people today means we have many times more opportunities for viruses to come up, combine, and mutate than we once did. I'm not sure which is the bigger phenomenon.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    Other things we have today that mitigate spread: 1. sanitation 2. hand washing 3. understanding of how the disease spreads (not swamp gas) 4. knowing that throwing virgins into volcanoes does not work 5. clean water
    • asveikau 5y ago
      Have we really done a thorough scientific test of #4?
      • undersuit 5y ago
        Maybe it's not all volcanoes, just the ones on ley lines.
  • peter303 5y ago
    People lived in small groups most of the time. Harder to spread.
• blocked_again 5y ago
  Our great ancestors were not doing gain of function research on viruses. If countries continues to do gain of function research on viruses we might not last the next two or three decades. No labs are 100% failproof. And there have been multiple cases of leaks even from the top security BSL4 labs.
  • londons_explore 5y ago
    Time we made BSL5, which is like dealing with a nuclear reactor. Everything is sealed inside when the lab is built, and lab operators operate everything remotely. No atoms ever enter or leave the lab during its lifespan.
• 99_00 5y ago
  >Should it though? Yes of course it will. The mainstream narrative is that the virus came from a wet market. Wet markets are still open and there is no discussion about what to do about it. The most basic lessons and precautions are forbidden topics.
• jeremyjh 5y ago
  > Should it though? Seems like we've survived Someone survived - but for the mutations to have a selection benefit strong enough to dominate that gene pool there would have to be more people who didn’t survive than did.
  • nradov 5y ago
    Not necessarily. Even a virus with a low infection fatality rate could have caused significant evolutionary changes if it was endemic across many generations.
  • robocat 5y ago
    > but for the mutations to have a selection benefit strong enough to dominate that gene pool there would have to be more people who didn’t survive than did. To be pedantic: the gene pool is mostly influenced by anything that prevents reproduction, i.e. if you have your kids, and then die that doesn't affect the gene pool to a first approximation (there are selection pressures of becoming an orphan, but they are likely usually very weak. If being an orphan makes it more likely one will have kids or more likely to have more kids than one would have otherwise, then the selection pressure will select for death, which is inverted from what is naively thought! Edit: And if you are older and have never had kids and die, there is very little chance for selection pressure.).
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  If 99.99% of people die, the species lives on, but everyone reading this is gone and so is civilisation.