It's already been demonstrated that the Covid-19 has mutated into becoming more easily transmissible. Perhaps there may be some scientific basis or physiological connection between being more transmissible and being less potent? Perhaps a stronger initial shock fires up the immune system to create a stronger herd immunity.
This seems to have happened before, but may not happen with Covid-19. It would be wishful thinking to rely on it for setting policy.
Article headline is misleading, the article itself provides more context and is less sensationalized.
I believe that this is happening in NZ and per the article, Italy.
But in other places (USA and Brazil come to mind) it’s a whole different story. Seems dangerous to suggest it could just die out, while cases are on the rise.
It also assumes, contrary to gathered data, that immunity lasts more than 3 months. There are now several studies that point to a short-lived immunity after fighting off this virus.
So far, the community of virologists and immunologists are warning that there will be a 2nd wave, possibly a 3rd and 4th wave as well, of this virus. The reasons are manifold and not at-all to do with governmental response.
No matter a government's response this is a novel virus, hey whaddoyaknow that's even what we're calling it, and it acts in manners that other viruses do not. Human bodies react to this virus differently than they do to other viruses.
To claim that governments are to blame is being disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at the worst.
Trouble is the article misses a very important point: that's just antibody (B-cell mediated) immunity. There is also T-cell immunity, which is harder to quantify so it doesn't get much attention, but we can be quite sure that it plays important role because many people who recovered from COVID don't develop effective neutralising antibodies at all. To recover from a disease like this you have to develop an effective immune response, so if it's not antibodies, it has to be T-cell immunity. Moreover, even for antibody immunity it's not the whole story, because it's normal and expected for antibody count to decline with time — we have memory cells that ensure rapid production of the relevant antibody when the same antigene is presented.
It's basically the case of paying attention to something we can measure just because we can measure it.
Living in the US, every day I wish I'd suddenly wake up to a government which places a greater degree of importance on science and the protection and benevolence of the greatest amount of human lives, both in the US and in the rest of the world. But right now, seems like science will continue to take a backseat to US corporate economic interests.
Science is so muddled and confusing. I'm sure even the top doctors and biologists don't agree on how to handle the virus because one study says you x is more effective than y but another says the opposite. In addition most "science" is funded by done large corporations or by people with ulterior motives. Science is not the word of God; it's a craft that is extremely prone to error, and I personally don't want my gov placing any more value on it than it is right now.
The real world is muddled and confusing... science in its proper form observes that world, attempts to find the underlying facts and make our understanding of the muddled confusion clearer.
It takes a lot of observing, thinking, and testing to arrive at a decent picture of what wasn't known before.
> Science is not the word of God
No, and that's a good thing. Scientific progress depends on revising knowledge as more facts accumulate and point in different directions. Until there's enough information to illuminate things well, there are a lot of questions, missteps, etc.
I would want the government, private institutions, and every individual to lean MORE on actual science than they ever have, and to understand its benefits AND limitations, because that is how the world learns and improves.
I think when you take a look at the interaction between science and government throughout history you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way. Thats not to say it is never useful, just that it is a form of information that should be used by our society with extreme caution.
But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing. With issues like pandemics science is more nessisary because it is a specific and specialzed issue not many people understand well, yet it is directly impacting most of our lives.
But if you look at the Amish people for example, you can live your entire life knowing almost nothing about science live a have a happy, healthy and meaningful existence. Generalizing that example more we can see that successful flourishing human civilizations have existed for all of our history and all of the probably had less than a percent of the scientific knowledge we have today, yet we are suffering from mostly tge same issues: suicide, racism, sadness, disfunctional governments, power struggles, etc.
You say that science is illuminating but I fail to see where science has truly made any part of the human expience more enlightened.
I would say as a first point of enlightenment, medicine. Many afflictions have been eliminated or mitigated.
> But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing.
I was illuminating the difference between the world around us being its complicated, partially unexplored self, and the GP saying that science is muddled and confusing, which it is, but to a lesser degree than the world it is developing from.
> you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way
Your use of quotes there is the tell... many have purported to "know" "scientific" facts when their beliefs were nothing but beliefs. And most/many have been cast aside as our level of knowledge has progressed. And that is the true progress of science - learning more about the world and changing from guesses about reality to knowledge about reality.
People will always have their agendas and limitations, but the process of learning and understanding always surpasses each individuals' limitations and gives us better understanding. Even if it is "one funeral at a time".
> But in other places (USA and Brazil come to mind) it’s a whole different story. Seems dangerous to suggest it could just die out, while cases are on the rise.
Both things can be true, and general the less fatal a virus is, the more contagious it is. i.e. dead people can't infect live people. I mean, other than in 28 Days Later.
Even places that have successfully controlled the coronavirus internally remain vulnerable to new resurgences imported from abroad. It all started in a single market
Immunity is substantially more complicated than it's usually summarized as in the popular press - it's not binary and can't be fully measured through the amount of antibodies in blood samples. As far as I know, health authorities are still comfortable working under the assumption that substantial immune protection will persist for a year or two.
The breathless reports that antibodies fade out are absurd. All antibody production fades, but immune memory cells persist and if the infection is reintroduced the B cells will rapidly trigger an immune reaction. The way that antibody fade out is being portrayed as a loss of immunity is profoundly ignorant of the immune system. You would not want your body to be producing full scale antibody responses to every pathogen you’ve ever encountered as it is energetically intensive and would harm the ability of the body to react to new threats
"...probably due to a genetic mutation in the virus which has not yet been demonstrated scientifically." -- you can stop reading once you get here. It's not that hard to find out if there was a mutation in the virus, you sequence it and compare it. If you didn't find any differences it means we probably got better at handling COVID19 - IE: earlier hospitalization, better care - rather than a weaker virus.
I agree that you can stop reading, but not with your rationale.
>It's not that hard to find out if there was a mutation in the virus, you sequence it and compare it.
There are lots of problems with this assumption. Sequencing is pretty quick, it's not instantaneous or free. More to the point, sequencing a single virus from a single individual who survived doesn't necessarily tell you anything about that virus. You would need to sequence many viruses from many patients, and compare patient outcomes (while controlling for other factors) with sequence data. That is neither quick nor easy.
Viruses can mutate quickly. From what I've read, SARS CoV2 doesn't appear to have a high mutation rate compared to other viruses more in the zeitgeist, but it's definitely much higher than, say, the typical mammal. That not only means that sequencing is harder, but it also means there will be multiple strains to compare. There isn't one virus: there are currently thousands (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global) of genomes publicly available, so there's a lot to look at.
Finally, the point the individual being quoted was making is that, after all that work, the best you're likely to come up with is "there are a handful of sequence changes that correlate to better outcomes." You haven't proved it ("demonstrated scientifically").
The reason you can stop reading here is that this is one person speculating, seemingly based off of anecdotal data. They have some authority and it's implied they are looking at a lot of data, but there are no hard stats or facts.
I think the emotional pressure to latch onto optimistic / pessimistic news is too hard to make correct, objective conclusions about this virus. If it isn't backed by data, I'm afraid anecdotal evidence is too biased by the human behind them.
I guess I have a worry that this is part of some larger editorial stance that tries to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic by cherry-picking the research that gets reported.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 71.3 ms ] threadhttps://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-other-coronaviruses-...
EDIT: This was making the rounds a week or so ago https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/science/coronavirus-mutat...
Do you have a link for that? I remember some speculation about this, but they did't have a solid case.
I believe that this is happening in NZ and per the article, Italy.
But in other places (USA and Brazil come to mind) it’s a whole different story. Seems dangerous to suggest it could just die out, while cases are on the rise.
So far, the community of virologists and immunologists are warning that there will be a 2nd wave, possibly a 3rd and 4th wave as well, of this virus. The reasons are manifold and not at-all to do with governmental response.
No matter a government's response this is a novel virus, hey whaddoyaknow that's even what we're calling it, and it acts in manners that other viruses do not. Human bodies react to this virus differently than they do to other viruses.
To claim that governments are to blame is being disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at the worst.
It's basically the case of paying attention to something we can measure just because we can measure it.
It takes a lot of observing, thinking, and testing to arrive at a decent picture of what wasn't known before.
> Science is not the word of God
No, and that's a good thing. Scientific progress depends on revising knowledge as more facts accumulate and point in different directions. Until there's enough information to illuminate things well, there are a lot of questions, missteps, etc.
I would want the government, private institutions, and every individual to lean MORE on actual science than they ever have, and to understand its benefits AND limitations, because that is how the world learns and improves.
But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing. With issues like pandemics science is more nessisary because it is a specific and specialzed issue not many people understand well, yet it is directly impacting most of our lives.
But if you look at the Amish people for example, you can live your entire life knowing almost nothing about science live a have a happy, healthy and meaningful existence. Generalizing that example more we can see that successful flourishing human civilizations have existed for all of our history and all of the probably had less than a percent of the scientific knowledge we have today, yet we are suffering from mostly tge same issues: suicide, racism, sadness, disfunctional governments, power struggles, etc.
You say that science is illuminating but I fail to see where science has truly made any part of the human expience more enlightened.
> But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing.
I was illuminating the difference between the world around us being its complicated, partially unexplored self, and the GP saying that science is muddled and confusing, which it is, but to a lesser degree than the world it is developing from.
> you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way
Your use of quotes there is the tell... many have purported to "know" "scientific" facts when their beliefs were nothing but beliefs. And most/many have been cast aside as our level of knowledge has progressed. And that is the true progress of science - learning more about the world and changing from guesses about reality to knowledge about reality.
People will always have their agendas and limitations, but the process of learning and understanding always surpasses each individuals' limitations and gives us better understanding. Even if it is "one funeral at a time".
Both things can be true, and general the less fatal a virus is, the more contagious it is. i.e. dead people can't infect live people. I mean, other than in 28 Days Later.
If immunity lasts no longer than a half-year, then there will be multiple new resurgences; it's a given.
>It's not that hard to find out if there was a mutation in the virus, you sequence it and compare it.
There are lots of problems with this assumption. Sequencing is pretty quick, it's not instantaneous or free. More to the point, sequencing a single virus from a single individual who survived doesn't necessarily tell you anything about that virus. You would need to sequence many viruses from many patients, and compare patient outcomes (while controlling for other factors) with sequence data. That is neither quick nor easy.
Viruses can mutate quickly. From what I've read, SARS CoV2 doesn't appear to have a high mutation rate compared to other viruses more in the zeitgeist, but it's definitely much higher than, say, the typical mammal. That not only means that sequencing is harder, but it also means there will be multiple strains to compare. There isn't one virus: there are currently thousands (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global) of genomes publicly available, so there's a lot to look at.
Finally, the point the individual being quoted was making is that, after all that work, the best you're likely to come up with is "there are a handful of sequence changes that correlate to better outcomes." You haven't proved it ("demonstrated scientifically").
The reason you can stop reading here is that this is one person speculating, seemingly based off of anecdotal data. They have some authority and it's implied they are looking at a lot of data, but there are no hard stats or facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph#Islamic_Ex...
I guess I have a worry that this is part of some larger editorial stance that tries to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic by cherry-picking the research that gets reported.