7 ms·

It matches what we've been told all along, that the virus will become more transmissable and less lethal.

by jacob019 5y ago

sjg007 5y ago
Your logic is faulty.
- spurgu 5y ago
  No it's not. The more a virus spreads, the more it mutates. The more it mutates towards more transmissible and less lethal, the more it spreads. Thus it's a positive feedback loop. Of course it's not a given though (there could be a more dangerous and more transmissible mutation), but the logic is clear.
  - jhardy54 5y ago
    The global maxima is high transmission and high duration, not necessarily low morbidity. A virus that makes you contagious for two weeks and then kills you is just as transmissible as a virus that makes you contagious for two weeks and then you get better.
    - derbOac 5y ago
      ... assuming no reinfection and that the population of infected individuals is always small compared to a reservoir of susceptible individuals.
      - tgv 5y ago
        And assuming no counter measures. The deadlier the virus, the more measures we take. So it's in the virus' interest to become relatively benign.
        spurgu 5y ago
        This is key. We're not looking at a statically behaving population, but a dynamic one.
        sjg007 5y ago
        The virus is not conscious.
        catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        "So it's in the virus' interest to become relatively benign." I don't speak viruscode Maybe those of us who the virus kill the fastest die, the rest develops immunity and transmission stops? All hypothesis
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Yes, but the public response will be completely different. We're not looking at a virus in a petri dish here, but one that circulates in a human society. That's what tends to lead the virus towards a less lethal evolution.
      - tigershark 5y ago
        Another logical fallacy here. If the society lets the virus spread more once it has become less lethal it has absolutely no effect on the lethality of the virus because the evolution happens in the past. In the causal world in which we live future actions have absolutely no impact on the present.
        spurgu 5y ago
        > In the causal world in which we live future actions have absolutely no impact on the present. Of course it doesn't have any impact on the present. Neither did the old apes have any advantage over other animals just because they were gonna evolve into humans in the future. Some of them did however evolve into humans, due to events in the future (none of which were necessarily clear where they happened). Your argument doesn't make any sense. We define the success of the virus. We could nuke all humans on the planet right now and get rid of Covid. Or we could impose strict military lockdown measures forever and get rid of Covid. We don't because of the low perceived threat. The virus mutates by itself (call it "in the past" if you will) but human psychology is the main driver of the success of the virus.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Not true nor guaranteed. Again your logic is faulty.
  - daxfohl 5y ago
    Yeah the real fun starts when it makes a quick hop in the opposite direction after we've let it spread everywhere. I keep feeling like what we've had so far is just a preview, and there's going to be some new variant that has a younger target demographic.
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      Why do you think the virus would all mutate at the same time everywhere? If we let a variant spread, and it mutates in someone there's no system update that will suddenly make the mutation appear in everyone else. It's not a Trojan horse. In reality it would probably just mean that everyone with the earlier less dangerous variant is probably immune or somewhat immune to the new variant if it ever "hops in the opposite direction".
  - tigershark 5y ago
    No that logic is completely wrong because covid-19, and especially Delta, transmits during the asymptomatic phase, so logically there is no inherent advantage in becoming less lethal if the lethality is independent from the transmission. Whoever is asserting that covid-19 WILL become less lethal is simply spreading misinformation.
    - spurgu 5y ago
      I clearly wrote: > Of course it's not a given though Plus, if we're still arguing the logic, how exactly does symptomatic/asymptomatic make any kind of difference here? You fail to explain how I'm "completely wrong". Asymptomatic spread is what's made Covid overall so transmissible in the first place, it's not a feature particular to Delta. The recipe for a successful virus is one that spreads easily. Viruses don't have any particular drive to kill (or even hurt) hosts. The less it hurts us the less we give a shit and the more we allow it to spread. Just look at Covid now. If it didn't kill people we would never have put up any measures and everyone would've had it many times over already. But from there if it were to mutate into a variant that starts hurting people, we would start putting measures in place to stop it. Evolution-wise that variant wouldn't do as well as the first one.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Stop spreading disinformation. You don’t know what you are talking about.
mmastrac 5y ago
It's true that over time the best reproduction strategy for a virus is to becoming incredibly transmissible but invisible to hosts, but the virus evolves via random walk and the local maximum could be more transmissible but lethal after a long delay. There's no guarantees with randomness, though on a decade-long scale we can probably be sure it will fade into the background.
- akira2501 5y ago
  The evolution might be random, but the environment it evolves in and human behavior in response to it is not random. It was my understanding that the latter function is why we expect the course to result in a more transmissible but less lethal virus. The more lethal it is, the fewer opportunities it would have to spread.
  - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
    Ebola is lethal. HIV is so bad that several treatments had to be engineered.
    - akira2501 5y ago
      It is lethal to humans, but not to the animals that typically carry it. Ebola didn't evolve in humans to become highly lethal, it evolved to cross species. HIV in and of itself does not kill you. It destroys your immune system in a lengthy process that ultimately leads to opportunistic infections that kill you. This process can take several months to several years. Likewise, HIV crossed species to infect humans, it did not evolve it's capabilities directly in humans.
      - sjg007 5y ago
        It is naive to think that Sars-Cov2 will evolve to be less lethal.
      - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        Now that you mention, SarsCovid2 might have originated in either a pangolin, a bat or a bioweapons laboratory, according to early media reports. I can't believe that I am being serious, but it is what it is.
abmxl 5y ago
If Omicron becomes the dominant variant, we can thank a country with low vaccination rates for breeding it! This is also what a couple of heretics have been telling us, but was suppressed in mainstream.
dragontamer 5y ago
Long term evolution of the virus would do that yes, but there is no guarantee that any particular mutation go in that manner. Alpha was just as deadly but more transmissible. While Delta was both more transmissible and more deadly for example.
smnrchrds 5y ago
Less lethal or more slowly lethal? HIV is no less lethal now than it was decades ago. It spreads without issues because it kills the host a few years after infection instead of immediately. But HIV is as much of a death sentence today for people who do not seek or do no have access to treatments as it was 30 years ago.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  HIV is transmitted pretty slowly - it may take many years to be passed on from one person to the next. Therefore any decrease in lethality might take hundreds of years to happen. Widespread use of treatments would probably also stop the selection of less lethal strains.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Who told you that? There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal. None whatever. Furthermore, no human virus has ever evolved to become less lethal. Unfortunately this myth is often used by those who would like us to let Covid keep on killing, in order to protect their cashflows and for ideological and political reasons.
- mherrmann 5y ago
  > There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal. Isn't there though? Say Covid killed within seconds. Then it couldn't spread. The longer the host lives, the more other people it can infect. I would almost say that the opposite of what you wrote is true.
  - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
    Length of time until death doesn’t mean a virus is less lethal. Rabies effectively has a 100% death rate and it can take years for it to kick in. There are cases of people suddenly showing symptoms 5 years after initial exposure, and once that happens, your brain basically rapidly rots and you drop dead. We have no clue what the long term effects of any covid variants are. We can only speculate.
  - tigershark 5y ago
    It’s exactly the opposite of what you are saying. There is pressure for the virus to NOT become more lethal in less time. It’s the opposite of saying that there is pressure for the virus to become less lethal in more time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fach 5y ago
  Did the Spanish flu not evolve into our less lethal, seasonal flu?
  - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
twic 5y ago
This is a myth, or a misunderstanding. SARS-CoV-2 does most of its transmitting before serious symptoms develop. The severity of those symptoms has no bearing on the fitness of the virus. We should not expect SARS-CoV-2 to evolve to be less lethal. https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1276802978582679552 https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12768029785826795... There are other pathogens which we would indeed expect to evolve to become less lethal. On the other hand, there are some which evolve to be more lethal, like Dengue.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  I wonder if a viable strategy for a future pandemic outbreak might be to deliberately encourage less lethal mutations to survive by, for example, having lockdowns that apply to contacts, friends and relatives of someone who died only?
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  On the other hand, we will be fighting less lethal variants much less. Less lockdowns and other hard measures, vaccines will be targeted at the more deadly variants obviously. That will play a role too in the long run. But it could take longer as it's not a direct effect.
graeme 5y ago
Name a single virus that did this. (Noting that we don’t know what happened to the Spanish flu)
tigershark 5y ago
No, you can’t say that it will, it’s completely false. There is no advantage for a virus that has the maximum transmission level in the asymptomatic phase to become less lethal.

It matches what we've been told all along, that the virus will become more transmissable and less lethal.

sjg007 5y ago

Your logic is faulty.

spurgu 5y ago
No it's not. The more a virus spreads, the more it mutates. The more it mutates towards more transmissible and less lethal, the more it spreads. Thus it's a positive feedback loop. Of course it's not a given though (there could be a more dangerous and more transmissible mutation), but the logic is clear.
- jhardy54 5y ago
  The global maxima is high transmission and high duration, not necessarily low morbidity. A virus that makes you contagious for two weeks and then kills you is just as transmissible as a virus that makes you contagious for two weeks and then you get better.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    ... assuming no reinfection and that the population of infected individuals is always small compared to a reservoir of susceptible individuals.
    - tgv 5y ago
      And assuming no counter measures. The deadlier the virus, the more measures we take. So it's in the virus' interest to become relatively benign.
      - spurgu 5y ago
        This is key. We're not looking at a statically behaving population, but a dynamic one.
      - sjg007 5y ago
        The virus is not conscious.
      - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        "So it's in the virus' interest to become relatively benign." I don't speak viruscode Maybe those of us who the virus kill the fastest die, the rest develops immunity and transmission stops? All hypothesis
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Yes, but the public response will be completely different. We're not looking at a virus in a petri dish here, but one that circulates in a human society. That's what tends to lead the virus towards a less lethal evolution.
    - tigershark 5y ago
      Another logical fallacy here. If the society lets the virus spread more once it has become less lethal it has absolutely no effect on the lethality of the virus because the evolution happens in the past. In the causal world in which we live future actions have absolutely no impact on the present.
      - spurgu 5y ago
        > In the causal world in which we live future actions have absolutely no impact on the present. Of course it doesn't have any impact on the present. Neither did the old apes have any advantage over other animals just because they were gonna evolve into humans in the future. Some of them did however evolve into humans, due to events in the future (none of which were necessarily clear where they happened). Your argument doesn't make any sense. We define the success of the virus. We could nuke all humans on the planet right now and get rid of Covid. Or we could impose strict military lockdown measures forever and get rid of Covid. We don't because of the low perceived threat. The virus mutates by itself (call it "in the past" if you will) but human psychology is the main driver of the success of the virus.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Not true nor guaranteed. Again your logic is faulty.
- daxfohl 5y ago
  Yeah the real fun starts when it makes a quick hop in the opposite direction after we've let it spread everywhere. I keep feeling like what we've had so far is just a preview, and there's going to be some new variant that has a younger target demographic.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Why do you think the virus would all mutate at the same time everywhere? If we let a variant spread, and it mutates in someone there's no system update that will suddenly make the mutation appear in everyone else. It's not a Trojan horse. In reality it would probably just mean that everyone with the earlier less dangerous variant is probably immune or somewhat immune to the new variant if it ever "hops in the opposite direction".
- tigershark 5y ago
  No that logic is completely wrong because covid-19, and especially Delta, transmits during the asymptomatic phase, so logically there is no inherent advantage in becoming less lethal if the lethality is independent from the transmission. Whoever is asserting that covid-19 WILL become less lethal is simply spreading misinformation.
  - spurgu 5y ago
    I clearly wrote: > Of course it's not a given though Plus, if we're still arguing the logic, how exactly does symptomatic/asymptomatic make any kind of difference here? You fail to explain how I'm "completely wrong". Asymptomatic spread is what's made Covid overall so transmissible in the first place, it's not a feature particular to Delta. The recipe for a successful virus is one that spreads easily. Viruses don't have any particular drive to kill (or even hurt) hosts. The less it hurts us the less we give a shit and the more we allow it to spread. Just look at Covid now. If it didn't kill people we would never have put up any measures and everyone would've had it many times over already. But from there if it were to mutate into a variant that starts hurting people, we would start putting measures in place to stop it. Evolution-wise that variant wouldn't do as well as the first one.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Stop spreading disinformation. You don’t know what you are talking about.

mmastrac 5y ago

It's true that over time the best reproduction strategy for a virus is to becoming incredibly transmissible but invisible to hosts, but the virus evolves via random walk and the local maximum could be more transmissible but lethal after a long delay. There's no guarantees with randomness, though on a decade-long scale we can probably be sure it will fade into the background.

akira2501 5y ago
The evolution might be random, but the environment it evolves in and human behavior in response to it is not random. It was my understanding that the latter function is why we expect the course to result in a more transmissible but less lethal virus. The more lethal it is, the fewer opportunities it would have to spread.
- catlikesshrimp 5y ago
  Ebola is lethal. HIV is so bad that several treatments had to be engineered.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    It is lethal to humans, but not to the animals that typically carry it. Ebola didn't evolve in humans to become highly lethal, it evolved to cross species. HIV in and of itself does not kill you. It destroys your immune system in a lengthy process that ultimately leads to opportunistic infections that kill you. This process can take several months to several years. Likewise, HIV crossed species to infect humans, it did not evolve it's capabilities directly in humans.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      It is naive to think that Sars-Cov2 will evolve to be less lethal.
    - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
      Now that you mention, SarsCovid2 might have originated in either a pangolin, a bat or a bioweapons laboratory, according to early media reports. I can't believe that I am being serious, but it is what it is.

abmxl 5y ago

If Omicron becomes the dominant variant, we can thank a country with low vaccination rates for breeding it! This is also what a couple of heretics have been telling us, but was suppressed in mainstream.

dragontamer 5y ago

Long term evolution of the virus would do that yes, but there is no guarantee that any particular mutation go in that manner. Alpha was just as deadly but more transmissible. While Delta was both more transmissible and more deadly for example.

smnrchrds 5y ago

Less lethal or more slowly lethal? HIV is no less lethal now than it was decades ago. It spreads without issues because it kills the host a few years after infection instead of immediately. But HIV is as much of a death sentence today for people who do not seek or do no have access to treatments as it was 30 years ago.

londons_explore 5y ago
HIV is transmitted pretty slowly - it may take many years to be passed on from one person to the next. Therefore any decrease in lethality might take hundreds of years to happen. Widespread use of treatments would probably also stop the selection of less lethal strains.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

Who told you that? There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal. None whatever. Furthermore, no human virus has ever evolved to become less lethal. Unfortunately this myth is often used by those who would like us to let Covid keep on killing, in order to protect their cashflows and for ideological and political reasons.

mherrmann 5y ago
> There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal. Isn't there though? Say Covid killed within seconds. Then it couldn't spread. The longer the host lives, the more other people it can infect. I would almost say that the opposite of what you wrote is true.
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  Length of time until death doesn’t mean a virus is less lethal. Rabies effectively has a 100% death rate and it can take years for it to kick in. There are cases of people suddenly showing symptoms 5 years after initial exposure, and once that happens, your brain basically rapidly rots and you drop dead. We have no clue what the long term effects of any covid variants are. We can only speculate.
- tigershark 5y ago
  It’s exactly the opposite of what you are saying. There is pressure for the virus to NOT become more lethal in less time. It’s the opposite of saying that there is pressure for the virus to become less lethal in more time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fach 5y ago
Did the Spanish flu not evolve into our less lethal, seasonal flu?
- catlikesshrimp 5y ago

twic 5y ago

This is a myth, or a misunderstanding. SARS-CoV-2 does most of its transmitting before serious symptoms develop. The severity of those symptoms has no bearing on the fitness of the virus. We should not expect SARS-CoV-2 to evolve to be less lethal. https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1276802978582679552 https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12768029785826795... There are other pathogens which we would indeed expect to evolve to become less lethal. On the other hand, there are some which evolve to be more lethal, like Dengue.

londons_explore 5y ago
I wonder if a viable strategy for a future pandemic outbreak might be to deliberately encourage less lethal mutations to survive by, for example, having lockdowns that apply to contacts, friends and relatives of someone who died only?
GekkePrutser 5y ago
On the other hand, we will be fighting less lethal variants much less. Less lockdowns and other hard measures, vaccines will be targeted at the more deadly variants obviously. That will play a role too in the long run. But it could take longer as it's not a direct effect.

graeme 5y ago

Name a single virus that did this. (Noting that we don’t know what happened to the Spanish flu)

tigershark 5y ago

No, you can’t say that it will, it’s completely false. There is no advantage for a virus that has the maximum transmission level in the asymptomatic phase to become less lethal.