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Viruses are interesting things. I once enjoyed a case study about an outbreak of common cold on an Antarctic base that only happened after 17 weeks of isolation

• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  The common cold is a set of viral infections caused by an assortment of viruses, that includes amongst them, four different coronaviruses. If COVID-19 were to evolve to become milder, it could become a fifth coronavirus that causes the common cold.
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  Or the freezing temperatures allows it to survive outside. For example your spit outside the shelter, you go outside 17 weeks later and then come back and remove the snow on your boots which are now covered in contaminated water.
• MobileVet 5y ago
  Strep can lay ‘dormant’ in people for a while. Two months after the original outbreak and lockdown my daughter got strep. We hadn’t seen a soul. Dr said one of us was likely the carrier.
  • desine 5y ago
    Had your daughter had it before? Once you get strep, you tend to get it semi-frequently. I get it once every couple of years. I always kind of wondered if it's like a viral infection such as cold sores where it lays dormant permanently, and flares up on occasion. However it is bacterial, and not viral, which counts against that idea.
    • Sunspark 5y ago
      Strep exists on the skin.
    • dilyevsky 5y ago
      Why is being bacterial count against it? Lyme and tb are bacterial also and known to do such a thing
      • desine 5y ago
        I'm admittedly pretty out of my element here. Apologies if any of the following is misinformed. Lyme and TB are chronic symptoms, from what I understand. No truly dormant stages in the infection, just slight lulls in symptoms. I was under the impression that chronic viral infections such as herpes or HIV were much more able to pass under the immune system's radar for prolonged periods of time, with unpredictable flare ups. From what I understood, this had to do with their cycles of replication and the nature of viral infections. But again, not my area of expertise. Or even in the same ballpark.
        • dilyevsky 5y ago
          No at least with TB most people will have a latent infection (no symptoms and not transmittable) present potentially for a lifetime just waiting for immune system to weaken enough
  • wbl 5y ago
    Step throat is caused by common skin bacteria that can spontaneously mutate and start attacking the throat.
• desine 5y ago
  They very much are interesting, and that's a pretty wild story. There are people a lot smarter than me, doctors in the field, that think we have some of our fundamental understanding of viruses wrong. I haven't read enough to take a stance that 100+ years of research is incorrect, but I do love hearing alternative hypotheses on a variety of topics. I don't think there's any harm in hearing what others have to say, at least.
  • dnautics 5y ago
    What aspect, specifically, is suspected to be wrong? The scientific understanding of viruses might be further along than most doctors suspect. There are concepts like pangenome that are becoming appreciated at the research level that might not have gotten to doctors yet.
    • desine 5y ago
      >What aspect, specifically, is suspected to be wrong? That depends on who you ask. Different people have different hypotheses and concepts they explore.
      • desine 5y ago
        Too late to edit, but I'm getting mixed votes (which I usually don't pay much attention to), so I will explain: There's a few different frameworks people are working within. From my experience, linking or forwarding to any "outside the box" ideas in this sphere will only invite more downvotes, argumentation over the details, and flamewars. Any linking of these ideas would be interpreted by some to be an endorsement of them. In my parent comment I made sure to mention that none of them were worthy of my endosement at this time, though I do find them interesting. Anyone reading this comment, buried deep in "hacker news" is capable of finding alternative ideas outside the norm. You can do your own research, if you like. I mentioned them because the idea of people disagreeing on this was actually more foreign to me than "flat earth" which I find "pretty far out there", when I first stumbled upon it. It's very uncommonly discussed, and I don't have the clout to either endorse or properly antagonize these ideas. It's intriguing to me that something as preposterous as "the earth is flat" can be much more widely known and discussed than "maybe the way we frame viruses is incorrect".
• tome 5y ago
  > the common cold didn't seem to be impacted by the severe lockdowns in the UK Really? Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't match the experience of myself and others that I know. Everyone I know was talking about how great it was that they hadn't had a cold for so long, during the lockdowns.
  • roywiggins 5y ago
    RSV (one of the main cold viruses) was suppressed in the US in 2020, yeah. It's back now. https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/rsv/natl-trend.html https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/rsv/natl-trend.html
    • amluto 5y ago
      Calling RSV a cold (especially if you’re a baby) is an understatement.
  • petercooper 5y ago
    Not exactly. The reference regarding flu is https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-cases-covid-england-phe-latest-b1805124.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-cases-covid-en... where apparently not a single case was detected in late 2020/early 2021, despite a period of time beforehand without lockdowns (roughly July through end of October). There are references in the media to colds being more prevalent throughout this entire same period though, but admittedly not during the lockdowns, as you say. From this I made an uneducated extrapolation that the common cold pretty much stuck around somewhere and began to rapidly spread again as soon as people got out and about (I got one first week of schools going back in September, as per usual), whereas flu clearly did not.
  • badRNG 5y ago
    You're probably correct here. Flu cases are tracked due to its severity. Cold cases are likely not often even paid attention to by many of those experiencing them. Anecdotally, I and my friends and relatives hunkered down for COVID in 2020, and we had more cases turn out to be actually COVID-19 than common colds.
  • 5y ago
• coding123 5y ago
  Ebola's going to be the next "fun" one that pops up. https://www.science.org/content/article/new-ebola-outbreak-likely-sparked-person-infected-5-years-ago https://www.science.org/content/article/new-ebola-outbreak-l...
  • VHRanger 5y ago
    It would have to change transmission mechanism. Until then unlikely
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Well once TikTok memes us into acting like zombies…
  • Gibbon1 5y ago
    Try Nipah Virus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipah_virus_infection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipah_virus_infection Read that and be afraid.
• lettergram 5y ago
  The CDC recently admitted as much. People can test positive for covid weeks after initially testing positive. Which implies they still are shedding the virus. https://twitter.com/abc/status/1476189028982702080?s=21 https://twitter.com/abc/status/1476189028982702080?s=21
  • nradov 5y ago
    A positive test indicates they are probably shedding pieces of viral genetic material. It doesn't necessarily mean they are shedding active virions. Sometimes there are just leftover fragments. In other rare cases immunocompromised individuals can experience prolonged active infections lasting for months.
    • ddingus 5y ago
      Word of the day: virons = a complete virus particle that consists of an RNA or DNA core with a protein coat sometimes with external envelopes and that is the extracellular infectious form of a virus. For me, the intrigue centers on my personal realization that I pretty much never think about individual pieces. And that is what this word is all about. It's everything needed for Covid to happen, no less, no more.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • throwoutway 5y ago
    This happened to me. I tested positive a month after infection (was testing once or twice a week). I isolated anyways to be safe
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      I thought I was meant to be testing every few days after my symptoms subsided until finally a nurse on the phone said “why do you need a test, you’re going to be have a positive result the next three months” Apparently PCR tests and antigen tests differ in this regard, but RIP to our insurance providers paying for millions of redundant tests
• WalterBright 5y ago
  We've all got pneumonia in our lungs, which gain ascendancy when the body becomes weakened. It's been historically dubbed the "Old Man's Friend" because it would peacefully carry off someone who was suffering under some other terminal illness.
  • anamax 5y ago
    As someone who has had pneumonia, it's not an "Old Man's Friend". There's nothing "peaceful" about pneumonia. It's a very frightening strangling feeling. The only thing "peaceful" about it is that you don't have the energy express the horror.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      This was related to me by my father, who had pneumonia as a teen and it nearly killed him. He was allergic to penicillin, and had to endure without it.
      • Jensson 5y ago
        Did he really say "we all got pneumonia in our lungs"? Pneumonia is inflammation in your lungs, that isn't normal. You die from it when it fills your lungs with pus and blood, pus and blood in your lungs isn't normal either.
        • WalterBright 5y ago
          Streptococcus pneumoniae
      • rascul 5y ago
        Looks like the phrase was written about in 1892. Probably it's older than that, though. > The term is attributed to William Osler, who in the first edition of his book The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) wrote: > In children and in healthy adults the outlook is good. In the debilitated, in drunkards and in the aged the chances are against recovery. So fatal is it in the latter class [i.e. the elderly] that it has been termed the natural end of the old man. https://pneumonia.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41479-018-0052-7 https://pneumonia.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41479-...
• Auracle 5y ago
  If I get really low on sleep I’ll usually develop a cold, even if I haven’t been around anyone that’s had one in some time. I feel like there’s a lot to virology we don’t have a good grasp on.
  • nradov 5y ago
    High stress can sometimes trigger certain common cold symptoms even in the absence of an active viral infection. Unless the virus has actually been cultured you can't be certain what's happening in your body. I do a lot of scuba diving. There are many anecdotal reports of divers who briefly experience cold / flu symptoms after failing to decompress correctly. The popular hypothesis is that tiny bubbles in the bloodstream trigger an inflammatory immune response, but who knows?
  • latchkey 5y ago
    We literally just discovered a new muscle in the jaw. It isn't a feeling that you have, it is a fact.
  • therusskiy 5y ago
    The same thing happens to me. But it doesn't have to be a virus, it may be bacteria living in our body and waiting for a moment when our immune system weakens (like after prolonged stress). It's been known for a while our body is crawling with some bad boys, like Staphylococcus aureus for example.
• juskrey 5y ago
  After years of self-observations I have a petty theory that, in addition to outside infections, we always have a zoo of cold viruses inside, and different factors trigger them from time to time. I am quite surprised this is never discussed and mentioned by scientific community. BTW for some other viruses this is well documented and acknowledged, but with cold/flu/covid we seem to suffer worldwide scientific amnesia.
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    I thought this is how viruses operated in general. If somebody gets infected by herpes they basically have it for life. It only rarely flares up, but it's clearly still there. I figured this applied to all/most viruses because of the way viruses reproduce. The immune system just takes care of them and prevents the viral load from increasing. Is that not the case?
    • nradov 5y ago
      That is not always the case. Only certain types of viruses such as herpes viruses remain dormant in the patient's body. Most respiratory viruses are completely cleared out within a few weeks, assuming the patient survives and has a functioning immune system.
      • Aerroon 5y ago
        But how? I'm genuinely curious. Don't viruses reproduce by getting cells to make copies of them? Is the immune system really capable of removing all of the affected cells?
  • ipspam 5y ago
    I have heard this before as well. Viruses and colds can live in the throat for weeks or months, people are constantly collecting them. When said person gets rundown, the immune system can't contain them, and they produce a cold or sickness.
  • viking1066 5y ago
    Sorry I can't find the article, perhaps drowned in covid articles however: There is a well known research paper from years ago showing that both exposure to cold temperatures and exposure to cold virus could cause cold symptoms, if I recollect right 30% probability when subjects were intentionally exposed to virus, 10% when exposed to cold temperatures. I don't recall the control group results. This is consistent with covid appearing as an outbreak out of nowhere.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• harshreality 5y ago
  Could be someone was harboring some kind of cold virus and due to the stress of the environment—it had turned colder 4 days prior—the virus reemerged and became infectious. Another idea that's not mentioned in the article, but that might be possible, is that there was some dust that contained enough of some respiratory virus to be infectious, and due to the recent cold or just by chance, someone was digging through some supplies and breathed it in. Usually viruses degrade rapidly in the environment, since they have no metabolism to speak of to correct damage; I wonder, though, if enough could survive in a cold environment with limited or no sunlight, especially if it was in a storage area that had low relative humidity. Critical part of the conclusion for those not wanting to skim the article: > Virus might have persisted in the respiratory tract of one or more men at the Base. If such were the case it would be necessary to postulate a triggering mechanism to precipitate symptoms, and it is interesting to note that symptoms occurred 4 days after a precipitous fall in outside temperature, and during one of the coldest months of the year, which Hope-Simpson (1958) and Lidwell, Morgan & Williams (1965) have correlated with increased incidence of respiratory disease. There is disagreement about whether the viruses which cause common colds can be carried by adults, and how important this is in epidemiology. The pattern of virus infection revealed by long-term studies, such as the virus watch programme (Elveback et al. 1966), is of a series of short infections with different viruses, and in the case of influenza virus disappearance of the current strain when a new serotype appears. On the other hand, adenoviruses may be shed by children for periods of months and recove"ed from the tonsils in a high proportion of cases, without evidence of acute respiratory infection, and non-respiratory viruses such as those of the herpes group often persist for the lifetime of a man. Furthermore, observations in animals have shown that pigs can carry swine influenza and transmit infection to other pigs 3 months later (Blaskovic et al. 1970), turkeys may carry and shed influenza virus A after apparent recovery (Robinson, Easterday & Tumova, 1972), and cattle which have recovered from foot and mouth disease still reproduce virus in the pharynx, and can initiate epidemics on contact with non-immune cattle (Graves et al. 1971). > There are thus precedents in both children and animals for persistence of respiratory viruses, but in adults the laboratory evidence for carriage and reactivation of common cold viruses is weak. It may be that such evidence can only be found in rather unusual conditions of isolation and stress, such as occur in Antarctica. It is likely to be a rare phenomenon, but it might well be important in explaining the persistence of the large number of rhinovirus serotypes which make an appearance in many areas when the temperature falls.
• raverbashing 5y ago
  I really do wonder how many and for how long viruses can stay in a person's nasal secretions until conditions are ideal again. Maybe some sinus washes would help.
• kjaftaedi 5y ago
  Or more likely the common thread here is Antarctica and the fact that not everything dies when it freezes.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  There is this old grandma theory that "don't run outside with wet hair, you'll catch a cold". Then we learned that viruses cannot spread like that, and so that old theory is basically invalid. But some time ago I read somewhere that this theory might still hold true somehow, because our nose stores all kinds of viruses, and they might burst out when we are weakened. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about this might chime in here ;).
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    I think that saying is a bit unfairly mailgned. For making fire, there is the rule of three, the triangle, and you need all sides to keep combustion going: - Heat - Fuel - Oxygen knock one out and it falters. We should describe infections the same way. Needed for infection: - Virus/pathogen - Outer defenses penetration (skin/mucous membranes) - Immune system defeat Seeing it that way, it doesn't have to be so mysterious. Some viruses are dormant or almost omnipresent. The infection may be triggered by other conditions changing, including factors that affect your immune system status or efficiency of your outer protections!
  • AnxietyJello 5y ago
    I thought the reasoning behind this saying was that when your body is cold your immune system needs to work harder to fend off Viruses and it was still true in that sense? Is that not the case?
  • roenxi 5y ago
    The lesson in medical science is that being guided by anything short of actual evidence lets in a lot of pseudoscience. In this particular case; there might be a correlation but that doesn't tell us much. There are so many possible reasons even without asking an expert for possible explanations: 1) The atmosphere is in an unusual state (lots of fast moving water droplets, probably with a lot of backscatter as they hit the ground fast or bounce off leaves). Maybe bacteria use that as a travel mechanism. 2) Maybe an immune system defence is weakened by high humidity. 3) Maybe wet weather causes changes in behaviour unrelated to being wet, but that lead to higher disease transmission and the correlation is being misintepreted. 4) Maybe the bacteria really like rain and multiply like crazy when it is wet. 5) Maybe some people have an unrelated non-infectious illnesses that are triggered by the cold, damp weather and that is being misinterpreted as a cold. 6) Maybe grandmothers just say that because it seems like good advice and they don't like water being traipsed through the house. There are enough different options there that any correlation is not actionable. Leaving aside whether any correlation even exists.
• henrikschroder 5y ago
  Note that the flu disappeared pretty much everywhere, regardless of interventions and restrictions. The likelihood that lockdowns or masks eradicated the flu is very low. More probable explanations are that we pretty much shut down international travel, which is how new flu strains get around, or that the coronavirus out-competed the flu, by being more easily transmitted.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    This would be very interesting if I knew it was true. Any specific references with flu stats by state/country? I also feel like lockdowns are a red herring in discussions like this. People not being locked down by force of law doesn't mean that a huge amount of people are minimizing their contact with other people.
• usrusr 5y ago
  I'd wager that virus infectivity decay is strictly stochastic in both time and dosage, that there isn't any truly safe exposure greater than absolute zero or truly safe time/distance when sharing air with infected. There are just thresholds of scientific perception where we say good enough. That would mean that yes, there is an infinitesimally small chance to get infected from a doorknob that hasn't been touched in three weeks, but those odds are so low that with eight billion people and two years of pandemic it's unlikely to ever have happened (and if it did we'd certainly not know about it). Living in quarantine, eventually getting driven to the airfield, plenty of infinitesimally unlikely exposure opportunities.