(Yes the virus will evolve but in general mutations will optimise for transmission and be indifferent to lethality.)
This is why there is an evolutionary pressure for all diseases to keep your host alive, and why some diseases/parasites ultimately evolve to be less harmful/lethal.
Lethality should be distinguished from "keeping the host alive." For example, HIV is more than 90% lethal (untreated) but can take a decade before killing the host.
Which is not the case for SARS-Cov-2 - viral titers peak after 2-4 days and population-weighted IFR is relatively low.
However on a global scale only some countries are sequencing some of the time, and only in humans (with ad-hoc exceptions)! Which is simply not enough.
Evolving implies some change to the genetic material, compared w/ prior generations.
Viruses can do that, and quite quickly, we can't.
I think we're working on all these fronts.
I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much.
I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's known that immunity against coronaviruses isn't long-lasting (look at the Rev Jackson and his wife, both of whom were vaccinated early this year and are now in hospital) and that antiviral treatment needs to start early (does everyone really want to do a PCR test every other day so they can start antibody treatment early like Governor Abbot?)
We'll have to start wearing masks indoor and stop being in crowded rooms until the virus is eradicated. Right now, with the population half vaccinated, we are setting ourselves up for a re-run of Marek's disease, this time in people.
But doesn't COVID have animal reservoirs? If it does, good luck vaccinating all the bats and monkeys of the world. Or what's the plan there? Wait until the virus has subsided “enough”, then... what exactly? Still be on guard 24/7/365/4, paranoidally testing each and every traveler, ready to quench a cluster formed around some volunteer returning from a distant part of the world?
Honestly, I don't understand the appeal of the ostrich strategy. Vaccination rates in Florida and Illinois are similar but in Florida, where they pretend Covid doesn't exist, the only thing they get is overflowing hospitals.
The way I see it, the long-term route is treating COVID like, say, malaria. You would get your vaccine when you travel places. Doctors would know what to test for based on your symptoms. But still, the contagiousness here is radically different. By the time you get to see your doctor, you could have infected dozens of people. So the most effective strategy is still isolation and pervasive testing?
IDK, I guess we will just have to sit there and see where we'll be with COVID in 5 years from now. Maybe the virus will really just get bored and go away (unlikely). If not, maybe people will get bored of being freaked out and more comfortable with the thought that electing a new government won't eradicate the virus but you can build more hospitals and keep getting your yearly COVID booster shots.
I dont know who told you eradication was still an option but it stopped being one in feburary of 2020 when nCov19 started commmunal spreading.
This. Does not. Go. Away.
5 years of reduced socialization will turn a large percentage of the population into nervous wrecks.
Eradication is a fever dream, did you bother to read the attached article?
Which - evidently, as we're still having "lockdowns" and "resurgences" 1.5 years after that "two weeks to flatten the curve" experiment - didn't work.
In COVID, we isolated everyone, sick and healthy (utterly unprecedented), then flooded the most vulnerable with sick people (bizarre care home mismanagement), and refused to give treatment or prophylaxis to anyone until they couldn't breathe, at which point they were put on a ventilator.
In some places, that's still the protocol. Others have learned from these mistakes and moved on.
When everyone has, COVID will cease to be a problem.
The original approach has worked for every other novel virus pandemic we've had - which happen regularly every few years. Even the very same people at Imperial College made similarly dire predictions for some of those pandemics at the time - and yet none registered more than a fraction of a flu season.
That original protocol, used repeatedly for years, was abandoned and effectively reversed for COVID, with ongoing disastrous results as anyone can plainly see.
Also i believe there was a pandemic response force that trump admin threw out.
That's an INCREDIBLY disingenuous comparison considering that COVID-19 has been with us for less than two years.
And, though I object to your characterization of said measures, extreme measures weren't taken because you couldn't catch it just via proximity. Also important to point out one big similarity - denial of both was used to dehumanize swathes of the population who were especially vulnerable.
And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result (ie, it's wild mess that makes no sense and more typically returns results opposite to expectation), it largely appears this would have been the case had we not ruined everything over it.
Looking at Google's worldwide deaths I don't see much of a decline. Sure, it's down from a peak, but it's actually on the way back up. What data are you using for that assumption that deaths are on the decline?
> And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result
South Korea, with a population of 51.71 million, is currently sitting at just over 2,000 deaths. Do you believe it to be sheer chance that their deaths are so low when compared to America?
Gibraltar had almost no COVID, vaccinated literally everyone and then had a massive (and ongoing) outbreak.
We can go back and forth for hours with many examples proving and countering each factoid of the "narrative" - and only make my point; it's an inconclusive mess.
Rigid adherence to the prevailing dogma is clearly foolish in such a situation.
As for deaths, if you really want to argue about it, you need to exclude the "died within 28 days of a positive test"'s, the ridiculously-ignored co-morbidities, and the "cases" that resulted in death that were based on RT-PCR's at cycle thresholds above 35, obviously. Those coronavirus "high score table" sites don't do that nor bother to account for any of many subtleties in reporting that can and do have major impact on results.
Good luck trying to figure any of it out then. But hey, don't let that stop you entertaining a false adamancy - I'm sure it feels just great.
Using Ioannidis and others you can make some attempt using seroprevalence studies if you're really interested, suffice to say it's just generally much, much less overall than the SAGE-induced nonsense, you've undoubtedly succumbed to, would have you believe.
Finally, as now hundreds of peer-reviewed RCT's worldwide have shown, it's now one of the most treatable illnesses out there, if you bother to understand its mechanism of cell infection and how to inhibit that, instead of not doing anything to help and then putting people on a 25%-survival-rate ventilator, which thus far has been the most common response.
The problem is not scientific or medical anymore, its political and social. The science and medicine has been worked out for months now.
Ah well, he tested positive for gunshot wound but thst was 28 days ago.
This is not an inconclusive mess in the peer reviewed scientific community when people use real data and studies to back their claims. The problem is that you are not sourcing your opinion from that community you are sourcing it from pointless online bickering and a confirmation biased perspective.
As for sweden your comaprison to the UK is disingenuous. Compare it to norway and finland for real understanding.
That is the end of any validity in test-derived deaths data.
I am sourcing my opinion exclusively from published, peer-reviewed science in well-established journals. If you are not aware of any of it, as it appears you just admitted, you are not a sufficiently qualified researcher and should refrain from comment.
There have been hundreds of peer-reviewed RCT's in vivo, in live human COVID-infected patients of many differing treatments for COVID, several of which have demonstrated high efficacy in reducing hospitalisation and death as both prophylaxis and treatment.
Scenario Four: SARS-CoV-2 follows an evolutionary trajectory with decreased virulence
Likelihood: Unlikely in the short term, realistic possibility in the long term.
Which makes sense as most transmission occurs in the presymptomatic phase, there's no selection pressure to evolve to be less deadly.
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
That was my thought too.
That was in interesting read, by the way. Thanks for sharing.
The viral evolutionary definition of benign is "does not kill the host or harm the host in such a way as to greatly reduce its ability to spread the virus."
Making the host brutally ill and totally non-functional for weeks is generally fine. Causing harm to the host that reduces its vitality or life span in the long term is fine. Polio met these criteria. It did not usually kill its host.
Benign is only one evolutionary path though. Another evolutionary path for a virus is to boost the R factor so high that it can burn through its hosts and still find more hosts, especially if there are say... seven to eight billion hosts. Smallpox was more like this. A more contagious form of Ebola could be like this.