Long story short, an IT department basically got wiped the fuck out by a recent wave of COVID. Two dead; several others hospitalized. One walked away unscathed and that one just happened to have been vaccinated.
Get your vaccines, folks. If you’ve got bullet proof college kids, drag them to the local CVS and make them get their shots.
And stop being incubators for new variants that will learn to defeat the vaccine. That’s what they do.
Yeah, that’s for sure. In fact I was reading an article that quoted a health official (immunologist) who was commenting on this - the idea that the new variants will eventually become more docile, less lethal…is just shit we tell ourselves at bedtime so that we can fall asleep. COVID could become less lethal, or more. Viruses have been on this planet for over a billion years. They’re gonna do their thing.
6gvtbtggv
Viruses do to tend to become less lethal as they become endemic by virtue that they survive better when they don’t kill or limit the circulation of their hosts. This is exactly what occurred with many of the so-called “childhood diseases” like measles and chickenpox that are relatively benign for the vast majority of the population–provided, of course, that you become infected during childhood and not later in life. Of course, it takes thousands of years to evolve into a relatively benign dominant strain, prior to which the virulence of dominant strains can vary widely. Smallpox (Variola) burned through populations throughout Eurasia periodically over since the 300 BCE and doubtless for millennia before that and except for splitting into a major and minor branch never became less lethal, absolutely devastating the native populations of the Americas when introduced in the post-Columbian period.
Despite the oft-repeated notion that we’ll achieve some kind of herd immunity threshold and the SARS-CoV-2 virus will somehow magically disappear, it is inevitable that it will become endemic in the population and continue to evolve because this virus is essentially perfect in terms of proliferation; it is airborne, most contagious early in infection prior to inducing symptoms, only causes severe signs and symptoms in a small minority of the population, and has been shown to reinfect people a few months after natural infection. A change to the ORF region that produces proteases and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase could potentially alter the replication rate and pathogenesis of the infected cell, and in fact most alterations occur in the ORF region because it is the largest part of the viral genome, coding for 29 individual proteins, so if the virus were to suddenly become far more virulent along the lines of SARS-CoV(-1) or MERS-CoV it would most likely be in that region.
Although it is unlikely that the virus will go from an infection fatality rate (IFR) of ~0.3% to something like smallpox in a single step, it is not beyond expectation that it could easily increase in the severity of morbidity and mortality by an order of magnitude. Fortunately, the mRNA vaccines seem to provide good protection against severe illness even when their effectiveness declines against infection, and the greater population that is vaccinated worldwide means less opportunities for novel strains that are more infectious or virulent to take hold and establish a foothold. Mostly, this pandemic should be a wakeup call of what a really virulent and highly infectious influenza or hemorrhagic pathogen could do. We need better disease surveillance and the ability to rapidly develop and assess effective therapeutics because this is far from the last pandemic threat we will face, particularly with mass migration of both people and animals from climate disruption and sea level rise.
Stranger