What made Covid different?

[LEMtheoriginal]

Corona viruses have been around for years. Weve probably all had colds caused by a coronavirus. Then there was SARs and Mers and people started getting twitchy. I remember when friends got stuck in Canada due to SARs.

How did Covid get so virulent? Random mutation that made a horribly virulent and dangerous strain or has the virus evolved, incorporating several mutations leading to increased virulence?

Does that mean future coronaviruses will continue to be as dangerous or will it be the same as prr-covid?

Also, what about the next flu or coronavirus? Will the world react differently to new viruses? Im not sure i can cope with livingin fear like we have for last year on a permanent basis.

Also, how has the flu season been this year? Is there a number for infections/deaths? More or less than usual?

Only some common colds are corona viruses. A great many are rhino viruses.

Chicken pox may not have as high a mortality rate as others, but it can cause serious illness and death. The fact that death rates are low is down to the vaccination program, not because varicella is harmless.

Some of us live in countries with very few covid deaths - and yet flu all but disappeared here also, so how do you explain that?

Lockdown and social distancing ? Lack of travellers from overseas bringing it with them ?

We were in lockdown in early autumn, out by winter, and social distancing was out by then also. There have still been plenty of coughs and colds, just not flu. The actual point I was trying to make to a pp was that flu deaths were not hidden as covid deaths, as we had very few of those.

I’ve been curious about whether we would have known it was a new virus without the technology to identify it is different (ie if microscopes etc didn’t exist). Would the deaths been put down to a bad flu season?

I think many would've been recorded as pneumonia, heart attacks, strokes, or blood clot issues Tumbleweed101 Quite a lot probably were in the early days.

I meant that quite a lot of covid deaths probably were misrecorded as heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, or blood clots, in the early days before we realised how many cases we had and before routine testing of patients in hospital.

I also worry about how many people will succumb to flu next winter, due to the loss of immunity that we have acquired as a result of all this social distancing.

Flu immunity is very long lasting. However, because there have been no major flu outbreaks because of social distancing it's goin to be hard to predict which flu strains will be most prevalent next winter and so which strains should be included in the flu vaccine.

I’ve been curious about whether we would have known it was a new virus without the technology to identify it is different (ie if microscopes etc didn’t exist). Would the deaths been put down to a bad flu season?

I suspect it depends how far back you go in time. The Victorians didn't have EM or sequencing but were able to identify different diseases caused by viruses that had similarish symptoms because of the symptom profiles and application of the scientific method. They were very big on classification. But earlier periods would have struggled.

@MimiPigeon

I understand there have been fewer flu cases because people have been hand washing and wearing masks etc.

The problem with Covid is that it’s new. Nobody has had it. Nobody is immune. So it’s possible for everyone to get sick at once. The current generation of kids will grow up with immunity to Covid because they’ve had it as kids when it wasn’t as dangerous. Same as chicken pox - we’ve all had it as kids so when we grow up it isn’t a threat. But if chicken pox appeared now for the first time and nobody had ever had it before, it would be dangerous the same as Covid.

Not if the government continues this nonsense zero covid strategy, where whole classes are sent to isolate due to one child having covid. The vulnerable have been vaccinated and yet children are still being protected from covid so how will the immunity build?

Also, how has the flu season been this year? Is there a number for infections/deaths? More or less than usual?

Much less, virtually 0. This is due to:

1. those who would have needed medical attention due to flu most likely got or died from covid
2. much, much higher uptake of flu vaccine
3. those most susceptible to bad flu have been shielding
4. better hand hygiene/ use of sanitizer
5. social distancing, masks and less social interaction generally.

Infections basically have 2 components- how easily they spread and how severe they are. SARS is quite severe but reasonably hard to catch. Ebola is very, very severe (roughly 50% fatality) but quite hard to catch unless you live with or care for an infected person. How infectious something is (how easy it is to catch) depends on how shedding it is and how long the incubation/ infection and pre/ low symptomatic period is. E.g. ebola remains symptomatic for 42 days POST infection so you are infectious for up to 3 months from initial infection. Coronavirus has a period of approx 1 week where you can spread it to someone else but aren't ill enough to think something is up, it's high shedding so you spread it easily, and it's mechanism (respiratory) means your likelihood of catching it is high. Those 3 things make it different to other severe coronaviruses (e.g. SARS).

children are still being protected from covid so how will the immunity build? Covid immunity is short lived anyway, so it won't ever really build naturally.

They are working on the vaccine for children now. But even without it, being exposed to the virus naturally gives some immunity later.

H1N1 the flu virus aka Swine Flu, when that resurfaced 10/11 years ago it was young people who were ending up really ill with it, older people seemed to have a natural immunity to it.
Later it was concluded that H1N1 was also known as Spanish flu. Which meant older people had already encountered it (it didn't just completely disappear after 1920) and had some level of natural immunity to it.

Kary Mullis. This is who I mean. I’m sure you are capable of searching for a video. He explains what it is and it’s limitations.

I don’t need to provide anything as it is available by searching.

It was a more or less inevitable consequence of industrialised farming, poor (or no) standards of animal welfare, and over globalisation.
That is correct (also destruction of natural habitats) and in a sense we were very lucky that it was this specific mild coronavirus - there are much, much more unpleasant zoonotic diseases out there.
But also, we are probably already beyond the threshold where the world's population can survive without industrialised farming and globalisation.

@Tumbleweed101

I’ve been curious about whether we would have known it was a new virus without the technology to identify it is different (ie if microscopes etc didn’t exist). Would the deaths been put down to a bad flu season?

One of the mainstream hypotheses now is that the "Russian flu" at the end of the 19th century was a similar coronavirus pandemic. The hypothesised strain circulates now as a harmless common cold, with people usually having it in the early childhood.