I wonder what the implications are for COVID in the long term. After catching it the first time, I lost all smell and taste for two months, and I can say my taste has been altered probably forever because of it. Does this mean I could catch it again and get anosmia regularly? What about long COVID?
Just a personal anecdote: I got covid a total of four times (tested for and verified insofar as such tests are reliable) Two of these were post-vaccination with Pfizer. Each time was lighter than the previous occasion. The first time felt like a nasty but short case of the flu, the second one like a moderate cold with very low fever, and the latter two times like minor head colds basically with no fever at all. In my case I only lost my sense of smell and taste the first time, but only for a few days, similar to how the flu can sometimes do as well. Never got so-called long-COVID, which seems to be rather ambiguous as a clinical condition (not arguing it doesn't exist, but there's lots left to investigate and much self-reported diagnosis that I frankly don't trust around many reports of it)
Some people get it differently from others and even now it can hit certain individuals ferociously, but it always was absurd to think that this virus would simply go away, as some people argued. That it should evolve into a milder variant like many other seasonal cold-like viruses made sense given the vast number of people it infected, allowing it to keep evolving dynamically. Some widespread viruses don't do this quite so much of course. Smallpox being an infamous example that never stopped being extremely deadly until it was eradicated, but that doesn't mean it can't reliably happen to other types of viral infections in certain biological categories.
People don't like to hear that COVID is airborne, that COVID is not over, and that COVID is NOT a respiratory illness but a vascular illness that causes multisystem organ damage, but this is true, and our governments don't fucking care who dies or becomes permanently disabled as long as people keep contributing to capitalism. So MOST GOVERNMENTS ARE NOW SOURCES OF COVID MISINFORMATION.
Exactly, but you sure wouldn't know it in most areas these days. Only in niche corners like r/ZeroCovidCommunity can you find actually useful information about this ongoing public health disaster.
The only sure protection available is wearing a properly fitted N95 respirator in public spaces. Unfortunately this is a tall ask for most people.
I came to that realization this fall, as everyone started getting sick again. I played mine off as just a cold as well, but we all know it was COVID. It was always inevitable that this would become endemic. It just sucks being the generation that had to build the immunity.
Most governments expected so from the beginning, and their strategy was all along to ride out the virulent variants and to meanwhile somehow prevent their health systems and economies from collapsing. And were called out for being too cynical about it. Zero Covid was a pipe dream all along, and only certain island countries had ever any hope of maintaining it.
>Did you test? I had a bad cold several weeks back and after 3 tests it's clear that it wasn't COVID.
I did not, but multiple family members did. Not much point anymore unless you're high risk. We've all got it, and no one's going back to wearing masks again.
It seems that the at-home tests became less and less reliable for newer variants. I've had family and friends take tests repeatedly to finally get a positive one or never get a positive at home test, but then get a (PSCR?) test at the hospital that was positive.
No idea if tests were updated or variants changed again. There also was a variant were sampling from the throat was the way to go. It's a mess and clear information seems harder to come by than it should.
SARS-CoV-1 had different transmission characteristics. It was most infectious when patients were sick. Since SARS-CoV-2 is transmissible already during the incubation period, its spread is much more difficult to control.
This is a very common approach and is called an attenuated vaccine[0]. The oral Polio vaccine is such an agent. But it only works if the virus can't out-evolve the vaccine, the immunity is long-lasting, and if the risk of spontaneous mutations becoming virulent again is low.
On average, yes. This is also the tendency for most diseases, too evolve into a form less destructive to their habitat so it's easier for them to get to new places to infect. Given that this is biology I will note there are surely counter examples and variations on how fast this trend takes place.
It’s largely a myth that viruses follow this evolutionary path and no such pressure really exists for COVID. It doesn’t kill enough of the population for this to exist and even when it does kill people, it can spread for weeks or months before they die.
Strains that infect more hosts outcompete other strains. People are protected themselves from further infection by being less active / more careful. Sure, if they also killed all hosts, they might themselves die, but it's more about infectiousness than lessening virulence, isn't it? Some infectious strains may be more virulent, some not.
Can they evolve to evade the tests? So many people relied on testing for this disease. More than most others, that it must have created some small selection pressure.
Yes, although it's still by definition not a good idea to catch a disease. If it hits you too hard, you stay home, get quarantined, or put into a hospital. But it has to cause at least some reaction in the host, else there wouldn't be any coughing and sneezing to begin with.
> We observed a decrease in COVID-19 disease severity surrogates after the arrival of the Delta variant, coinciding with significantly smaller plaque sizes.
The sentence before leads to the claim. Surrogate is the key word here since it’s really hard to directly quantify.
Readit News
Some people get it differently from others and even now it can hit certain individuals ferociously, but it always was absurd to think that this virus would simply go away, as some people argued. That it should evolve into a milder variant like many other seasonal cold-like viruses made sense given the vast number of people it infected, allowing it to keep evolving dynamically. Some widespread viruses don't do this quite so much of course. Smallpox being an infamous example that never stopped being extremely deadly until it was eradicated, but that doesn't mean it can't reliably happen to other types of viral infections in certain biological categories.
The only sure protection available is wearing a properly fitted N95 respirator in public spaces. Unfortunately this is a tall ask for most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-history-of-the-fo...
More recently, "Zero COVID" has come to mean something completely different from the original notion of "strict lockdowns" -
https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/11jvg19...
It's an individual choice that people can make to put their health above the demands of capital and other pressures.
Did you test? I had a bad cold several weeks back and after 3 tests it's clear that it wasn't COVID.
I did not, but multiple family members did. Not much point anymore unless you're high risk. We've all got it, and no one's going back to wearing masks again.
No idea if tests were updated or variants changed again. There also was a variant were sampling from the throat was the way to go. It's a mess and clear information seems harder to come by than it should.
Deleted Comment
Probably would only make sense at the very beginning of a (new) pandemic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19/do-bad-viruses-al...
The sentence before leads to the claim. Surrogate is the key word here since it’s really hard to directly quantify.