TheOneX wrote: ↑Wed Mar 09, 2022 1:39 pm
Also covid is not going to evolve into something more deadly any time soon, if ever. For starters there is a reason why most coronaviruses are considered common colds, because it simply is not in the nature of coronaviruses to evolve to be deadly in humans. It either takes artificially changing the virus or a zoonotic jump to be deadly. Secondly, this variation of covid essentially has the maximum compatible spike protein, which means it is essentially impossible for it to become more transmissible or deadly with its current means of entering cells. In order to become more deadly it would need to essentially evolve a completely different type of spike protein which is not something that is remotely likely to happen any time soon. Add to that the nature of human immune reactions as more people have it the more protected people will be to future variants, making it more difficult for future variants to spread rapidly and be deadly.
(1) I would like to point out that "coronavirus" refers to a suborder of viruses and generally describes a vast number of viruses. The ones that cause the common colds are totally different. It's like saying "well, I'm not afraid of sharks because we all had goldfish when we were kids and we they weren't all that dangerous, right?". These are totally different things.
(2) These meme that viruses necessarily evolve to become benign is fake science bullshit. Sometimes they do. Other times they don't. Examples of when they don't: smallpox, polio, cholera, hantavirus, ebola, marburg virus, and now... *dun* *dun* *dun* *dun* sars-cov-2. With the exception of a single variant (omicron), all the other variants have been more virulent. Alpha was more virulent than the original Wuhan strain; delta more virulent than alpha.
(3) Your analysis mistakenly characterizes the evolution of sars-cov-2 as this linear line; as if the original Wuhan strain became alpha, which became delta, which became omicron. That's not what happened. Obviously the original strain is the common ancestor, but these variants are all branched out now and doing their own things. Maybe omicron will continue spawning off less virulent variants, but that doesn't stop delta from spawning off even more virulent variants, and nothing stops brand new variants from emerging, especially from all the other animal reservoirs out there.
(4) If you want to look at a ceiling of how bad this can get, all of sars-cov-2's nearest cousins, viruses like MERS have case fatality rates near 50%. Nobody knows how many mutations away one of these variants might be from unlocking that kind of potential.
(5) The idea that this virus is merely limited by the spike protein is silly. I know virologists right now are trying to figure out just how omicron can spread so fast. It seems to have found another way to infect cells besides the ACE2 receptor. You are not considering all the possibilities here by assuming the virus can only use the spike protein to infect cells via the ACE2 receptor. Omicron shows us that probably is not true. It seems to be abandoning the ACE2 receptor.
As for the potential receivers of those infectious particles, Barclay suggests that Omicron’s transmission strength might be linked to how it enters cells. Earlier versions of SARS-CoV-2 relied on a cellular receptor, ACE2, to bind to the cells, and on a cellular enzyme called TMPRSS2 to cleave its spike protein, granting the virus entry. Omicron has mostly abandoned the TMPRSS2 route. Instead, cells swallow it whole, and it lands in intracellular bubbles called endosomes2,6.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00428-5
I am resigned to the fact that some kind of killer variant has to kill a lot of people before we actually do anything. I am just kind of bored today and thought I would post here. I think you guys should consider you are talking each other up about the wrong things. The vaccines and all this cable news nonsense is not really worth getting upset about. I think this pandemic might be really dangerous to us. Even at the practical level, I really don't see how we can afford the mass disability wave we will suffer if we don't manage the infection rates better.