<div dir="ltr">Here you conflate a couple of things: It isn't the case that the ability of a virus to spread is inversely correlated to its severity. (In fact, with Covid-19 we saw that the Delta variant was both more contagious AND resulted in more severe illnesses because hosts shed more virions) What contagion <i>is </i>correlated with is the activity of the host -- and with Covid-19, you have a long incubation period where the host doesn't experience symptoms and can go around spreading before they realize they're ill -- and in fact some people never feel very sick at all, like patient zero in New Rochelle, and keep spreading for days -- that's part of what has made this coronavirus so successful compared to past related coronaviruses like MERS where patients progressed to being bedridden very quickly once symptoms occured.<br><br>In fact, once you start to think about how virus' ability to get around affects its evolution, here's an interesting but important side note: when people wear masks and social distance, it makes it harder for the virus to hop from person to person -- meaning the virus has <i>even stronger </i>motivation to keep its host alive and well...i.e. to be less dangerous. There are already signs of how this is affecting Covid-19 -- check out Figure 5: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02548-w">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02548-w</a><div><br><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 7:45 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">We are hearing about omicron covid, and the actions various governments are taking to try to stop it, but we have seen this before: nothing can stop a virus. Sooner or later it will get everywhere, we know the story well.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">Virologists point out that the very most contagious mutations are those which don’t really do much, because the host spreads it all over the place before she even realizes she has it. OK that makes sense to me.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">What if… after all this suffering and all those people perished… this is that variant which spreads really easily because doesn’t make the person all that terribly sick, but alerts the immune system in such a way that it generally reacts effectively when any of the covid mutants come along? If that is the case with omicron, then we are once again doing exactly the wrong thing: trying to stop a virus which would be beneficial (in a sense) because it would out-compete its more-deadly siblings, alerting (or training) the human immune system without actually slaying the prole who caught it. <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">Perhaps if omicron just runs its course, it would lead to an outcome plenty of virologists suggest was the possible reason why SARS came on so suddenly in 2009, then just as suddenly just went away: a SARS variant which doesn’t do much went thru and outplayed its siblings, alerting the immune system in a way that these vaccines are apparently mostly failing to do.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">Have we medical hipsters among us who wish to comment?<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">spike<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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