YouBet said:

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It's been endemic for well over a year.

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YouBet said:

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It's been endemic for well over a year.

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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eric76 said:

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...Our best chance is probably to develop vaccines that provide a long term immunity. With the reassortment process which we are reportedly already seeing, this could be tough.

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eric76 said:

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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YouBet said:

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It's been endemic for well over a year.

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Easy, Rod said:

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eric76 said:

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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can you please edit your post to include this is your opinion and not based on any sort of professional medical qualification?

I truly believe posts like this do a great disservice to this board and creates misinformation.

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Capitol Ag said:

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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Ya there is. Like pretty much our entire understanding of virology says that most viruses weaken as natural selection gets rid of the viruses that kill off most of their hosts. No host, no place to thrive.

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eric76 said:

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Aston94 said:

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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This is not accurate. Generally viruses get more mild over time as they want to survive and spread.

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I don't know where this idea comes from.

If a virus was found only in humans, spread easily, and killed everyone it infected, then you might have a point. I'm not sure how it would even be possible for such a virus to evolve to that point. For a zoonosis, it just needs to keep going among one or more species.

Look at rabies. It kills nearly every being it infects but we are no closer to eradicating it than we were 200 years ago. There are still tens of thousands of people who die from it every year around the world. The limits on it are not that it is so lethal but that it doesn't spread so fast that it wipes out an entire species.

Evolution depends on those traits which enhance the reproduction of those members of the species. Any trait that makes the member of the species more fit to reproduce will have an edge over other traits. Those traits are only about fitness to reproduce, not about what they do to the species they infect.

I know of no virus that kills the host before it reproduces. If you know of any, please let me know of them. Unless there are such viruses, any virus has already reproduced at the point that it kills the individual. What is important for the evolution of the virus is the fitness of the virus to reproduce, not whether it kills individuals after it reproduces.

Also, most viruses do not kill the majority of their infected hosts. Rabies is the most notable exception, but there are some other viruses that kill most of its hosts. Covid is not such an exception.

In the case of humans, we are better able to identify diseased individuals and treat them or avoid them, but that is fairly recent. If you look just a few centuries back at the black plague (note that it was not caused by a virus), when a person was infected with yersinia pestis (from memory, might be mispelled) and got bubonic plague, they were often taken by their family into their homes oblivious to the fact that the pneumonic plague they would acquire was far more deadly than the bubonic plague. In the end, the person who had bubonic plague had maybe a 40% chance of surviving it while the rest of the household were all very likely to be dead from the pneumonic plague. With our greater knowledge and increased ability to deal with such diseases, we are far less likely to see this happen in the few cases of bubonic plague in the US each year.

Future variants of covid that emerge, whether from mutation or from reassortment, may be less lethal or they may be more lethal. There is no magic hand guiding them to be less lethal.

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Aston94 said:

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eric76 said:

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Aston94 said:

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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This is not accurate. Generally viruses get more mild over time as they want to survive and spread.

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I don't know where this idea comes from.

If a virus was found only in humans, spread easily, and killed everyone it infected, then you might have a point. I'm not sure how it would even be possible for such a virus to evolve to that point. For a zoonosis, it just needs to keep going among one or more species.

Look at rabies. It kills nearly every being it infects but we are no closer to eradicating it than we were 200 years ago. There are still tens of thousands of people who die from it every year around the world. The limits on it are not that it is so lethal but that it doesn't spread so fast that it wipes out an entire species.

Evolution depends on those traits which enhance the reproduction of those members of the species. Any trait that makes the member of the species more fit to reproduce will have an edge over other traits. Those traits are only about fitness to reproduce, not about what they do to the species they infect.

I know of no virus that kills the host before it reproduces. If you know of any, please let me know of them. Unless there are such viruses, any virus has already reproduced at the point that it kills the individual. What is important for the evolution of the virus is the fitness of the virus to reproduce, not whether it kills individuals after it reproduces.

Also, most viruses do not kill the majority of their infected hosts. Rabies is the most notable exception, but there are some other viruses that kill most of its hosts. Covid is not such an exception.

In the case of humans, we are better able to identify diseased individuals and treat them or avoid them, but that is fairly recent. If you look just a few centuries back at the black plague (note that it was not caused by a virus), when a person was infected with yersinia pestis (from memory, might be mispelled) and got bubonic plague, they were often taken by their family into their homes oblivious to the fact that the pneumonic plague they would acquire was far more deadly than the bubonic plague. In the end, the person who had bubonic plague had maybe a 40% chance of surviving it while the rest of the household were all very likely to be dead from the pneumonic plague. With our greater knowledge and increased ability to deal with such diseases, we are far less likely to see this happen in the few cases of bubonic plague in the US each year.

Future variants of covid that emerge, whether from mutation or from reassortment, may be less lethal or they may be more lethal. There is no magic hand guiding them to be less lethal.

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Here you go Eric, read and learn. You are generally off from scientific consensus.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2021/12/13/virus-evolution/

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Quote:

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Do viruses evolve to a benign relationship with their hosts?

How does virulence influence viral evolution? It has been proposed that when a virus and host undergo co-evolution over a long period of time, a benign relationship will develop such that the virus will not cause disease. SIV is cited as an example. SIV strains are relatively benign in their natural simian hosts, where they have presumably been long established. However, when the SIVs mm strain crossed from its natural hostsooty mangabeysinto macaques, a novel host, it caused an AIDS syndrome.

However, a survey of mammalian viruses and their cognate hosts suggest that there is no necessary correlation between virulence and coevolution. Long-established virus infections range from inapparent to fatal. For instance, in the prevaccine era, poliovirus paralyzed only 1 person in every 150 infected (149 infections were inapparent), while rabies is 100% fatal in most of its animal and human hosts. Prior to smallpox eradication, there were two strains of variola virus. Variola major caused 30% mortality but variola minor only 1% mortality; yet each strain was maintained in the human population. It appears that viruses have used many strategies to perpetuate themselves in their host populations. Some strategies are benign, while others cause serious disease in their hosts.

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Quote:

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As we face the current pandemic, it will be important to understand how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is likely to evolve in the months and years ahead. It's possible the virus could lose its lethal character and settle into an evolutionary dtente with humanity. It might end up as just another cold virus, as may have happened to another coronavirus in the past. But it could also remain a serious threat or perhaps even evolve to become more lethal. The outcome depends on the complex and sometimes subtle interplay of ecological and evolutionary forces that shape how viruses and their hosts respond to one another.

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One popular theory, endorsed by some experts, is that viruses often start off harming their hosts, but evolve toward a more benign coexistence. After all, many of the viruses we know of that trigger severe problems in a new host species cause mild or no disease in the host they originally came from. And from the virus's perspective, this theory asserts, hosts that are less sick are more likely to be moving around, meeting others and spreading the infection onward.

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Other evolutionary biologists disagree. The pandemic certainly faded as more people became immune, but there's no solid evidence that OC43 itself evolved from highly virulent to mostly benign over the last century, they say. Even if it did, that does not mean SARS-CoV-2 will follow the same trajectory. "You can't just say it's going to become nicer, that somehow a well-adapted pathogen doesn't harm its host. Modern evolutionary biology, and a lot of data, shows that doesn't have to be true. It can get nicer, and it can get nastier," says Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. (Holmes is blunter: "Trying to predict virulence evolution is a mug's game," he says.)

To understand why it's so hard to predict changes in virulence, Read says it's important to recognize the difference between virulence that is, how sick a virus makes its host and its transmissibility, or how easily it passes from one host individual to another. Evolution always favors increased transmissibility, because viruses that spread more easily are evolutionarily fitter that is, they leave more descendants. But transmissibility and virulence aren't linked in any dependable way, Read says. Some germs do just fine even if they make you very sick. The bacteria that cause cholera spread through diarrhea, so severe disease is good for them. Malaria and yellow fever, which are transmitted by mosquitos, can spread just fine even from a person at death's door.

Respiratory viruses, like influenza and the human coronaviruses, need hosts that move around enough to breathe on one another, so extremely high virulence might be detrimental in some cases. But there's no obvious evolutionary advantage for SARS-CoV-2 to reduce its virulence, because it pays little price for occasionally killing people: It spreads readily from infected people who are not yet feeling sick, and even from those who may never show symptoms of illness. "To be honest, the novel coronavirus is pretty fit already," Geoghegan says.

Nor are there many documented instances of viruses whose virulence has abated over time. The rare, classic example is the myxoma virus, which was deliberately introduced to Australia in the 1950s from South America to control invasive European rabbits. Within a few decades, the virus evolved to reduce its virulence, albeit only down to 70 to 95 percent lethality from a whopping 99.8 percent. (It has since ticked up again.)

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Aston94 said:

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Here is more for your listening/reading pleasure.

Viruses which transmit via respiratory system generally get weaker.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/09/1071663583/viruses-evolve-and-weaken-over-time-what-does-that-mean-for-the-coronavirus

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96ags said:

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Aston94 said:

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Here is more for your listening/reading pleasure.

Viruses which transmit via respiratory system generally get weaker.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/09/1071663583/viruses-evolve-and-weaken-over-time-what-does-that-mean-for-the-coronavirus

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I applaud your effort man, but you are arguing with the hardest working man in (whatever the topic is).

Whatever you know or have done, he has done twice and still owns the tee shirt.

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eric76 said:

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Aston94 said:

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Here is more for your listening/reading pleasure.

Viruses which transmit via respiratory system generally get weaker.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/09/1071663583/viruses-evolve-and-weaken-over-time-what-does-that-mean-for-the-coronavirus

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Read it again.

Quote:

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So that's all to say omicron is clearly more mild in terms of the infection fatality ratio, in terms of the hospitalization rate. How much of that is because the virus has evolved to be milder in all the ways we were just talking about in terms of this relationship between transmission and virulence? Possibly - also totally possible it's about the same amount of virulence, but our population has so much more immunity that we don't get nearly as sick. And this is true even in places where the virus has transmitted so much, unfortunately, in the past that there is a lot of population-level immunity even without high vaccination rates.

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In any event, I've never said that a virus cannot weaken. What I have said repeatedly is that a virus doesn't have to weaken.

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heineman78 said:

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eric76 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Our best chance is that it stays on the path like omicron where it continues to get more mild while at the same time we continue to layer on natural immunity from continuing to catch it. I imagine vaccines will be a constant chase and guess like the flu shot

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There's no scientific reason to expect it to keep weakening.

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And there's no scientific reason to expect it not to.

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eric76 said:

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AG81xx said:

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You have to consider the effect of the virus's strength on the behavior of the host. A sicker person will know they have it sooner and isolate more making it less transmittable. A weaker virus should be more transmittable as the host doesn't know he has it and exhibits behavior that promotes transmission.
Saying there is no connection between transmissibility and virulence would ignore this effect.

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That may be true at the extremes. If a rabid dog is aggressively barking at you and drooling all over the place, you probably aren't going to be inclined to pet it.

In general, though, people don't seem to be that careful about avoiding someone who is infected with various diseases and those who are infected often don't do much to avoid mixing in public.

So in an ideal world, that may be the case, but this is the real world.

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