Italian doctors saying Covid is getting less potent!?

[Chosennone]

Hopeful link works 🤞
I read this and there is very little detail. I was surprised that it said that the virus is virtually eradicated in Italy.

mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2370OQ?__twitter_impression=true

@Cornettoninja, viral load refers to the volume of virus an infected person is carrying around . A very sick person will have a high viral load. If their body fluids enter someone else ( think a sick person in intensive care infecting a health care worker, for instance) that person is more likely to get infected than if the bodily fluids of someone who had an infection, but a lower viral load, had infected them. As a person recovers the viral load drops and they get less and less infectious. HTH. It’s the same with HIV, sex with a person with a high HIV viral load is more likely to result in infection than with someone with a low viral load. But the later is still possible obviously.

Pink houses, then you will know that it was around for the best part of 3 centuries, more in some areas, and was only really weakened by the changes in society that lessened the transmission. Not really a good example!

Well, that certainly sounds positive? Every little ray of light at the end of the tunnel is welcome

Maybe politicians will never admit to this but will crow about how they won the war when in Trump's words sometimes they just disappear and go away.

I heard Dr Xand (operation ouch) mention that there was a small scale epidemic in 1890 of the coronaviruses that are now in circulation. Lots died but the virus did adapt to survival and now is jut

@Cornettoninja

I keep reading about viral load and it’s confusing me a bit tbh. Someone on here very kindly explained to me that viral load wasn’t an issue regarding transmission - an infective dose is an infective dose - but that article has gotten me musing on it again.

The way I initially understood it (and was corrected on) was that if you were exposed to lots of the virus then it was harder for your system to fight it off because a high viral load would overwhelm your immune system before it had chance to make any antibodies but a small viral load was manageable for most people’s immune systems. I originally came across a discussion where people were theorising why some people were asymptomatic and medics were at higher risk due to repeated exposure to high viral loads.

I wonder if this virus acts like a poison so it is relevant how much exposure you have meaning the wider it’s spread through the population the more exposure any one person is likely to have.

The virus acts like a virus. Each virus will embed itself in one of your cells and replicate. Your bodies immune system will try to destroy it.

Viral load is very important. If only one virus particle enters your body then your immune system has a much better chance of eradicating it. The longer the time period you spend with any one person shedding the virus the more virus particles will enter your body. Each virus that enters your body will replicate if it is not destroyed. Once replicated, each virus will replicate again. It's an exponential increase, so each extra virus you start with results in many, many more virus.

This is why the time spent with an infective person, plus the amount of virus they are shedding, plus the number of different people you meet will all have an impact on the likelihood of you being ill, and the more exposure you have the more likely you will be seriously ill

Let's say you have a dog. And we're in an imaginary world where only dogs carry fleas. If your dog stays in the house, they're not exposed to any fleas, so can't catch them.
If your dog goes outside and meets another dog, their likelihood of catching fleas will depend on (a) how many dogs they meet (b) how many of those dogs have fleas (c) how many fleas each of the dogs they meet has (d) how much close contact they have with the other dogs

Let's say 1 flea takes 1 day to produce 1 more flea. So the pattern each day would be 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128. If your dog catches 10 fleas it will be 20,40,80, 160, 320, 640, 1280. See the problem?

Just like a normal cold. (Could have some details wrong here, I was watching and facebooking at the same time!)

I’m really hoping that’s the case!

Sorry, I pressed send too soon and now my paragraph is split up

I've seen reports before that suggested it seemed if anything to be becoming weaker, although I have also gathered that with new viruses this is quite a slow process. I suspect the winter will tell us quite a lot about which way it's going.

Overall, I suspect we will learn a lot in the next six weeks or so, given that quite a few European countries lowered their lockdown a fortnight ago.

@Northernsoullover

I often wondered if the common cold was just as lethal in its first round. Another thing I'm wondering is whether we will see a huge decline in norovirus and chicken pox. That said I believe some animals can be norovirus reservoirs so it could be a moot point.

I don't know about norovirus and chickenpox but some people think HIV can be eradicated.

A good virus will be more virulent but less deadly, viruses like to keep their host alive for transmission.

Caronavirus may end up being just one of the common cold viruses eventually. Any new disease kills a few hundred thousand before it changes or the stronger members of the species survive. Nature is cruel, and it really is survival of the fittest.

I think we were lucky it was a caronavirus and not influenza, otherwise you would be seeing death rates like 1918.

Great if true, but we really need to be sure before shouting "victory" and reopen everything...

Really hope it is true.

I often wonder about a virus mutating, surely there are currently tens of millions of people in the world with Covid and the ability to spread it on. When it mutates surely all those cases don't suddenly mutate at once into a lesser strain? The virus doesn't communicate with other versions of the virus in other people and all decide to mutate at one time.

I've seen reports before that suggested it seemed if anything to be becoming weaker, although I have also gathered that with new viruses this is quite a slow process.

I hate to be the negative one here but i remember a virologist on Radio 2 a few weeks back being asked by Jeremy Vine how likely is it that the virus will mutate to a weaker strain and he said it's highly unlikely. I really hope he's wrong, or i misheard.

This would seem to fit with the facts that new infections are reducing very, very slowly or even static but admissions to ICU are steadily going down

Does anyone remember at the start of all this seeing this prediction from the 90s that there will be a global pandemic in 2020 and then it will mysteriously disappear as fast as it appeared?? How strange if that ends up being true .... I really don’t normally believe stuff like that

Let's hope so

The problem is even if there was several different peer reviewed studies showing that the virus had mutated to be less dangerous than the common cold we'd still have a not insignificant proportion of society refusing to go back to normal and calling for continued lock down due to there not being a vaccine.

@Beawillalwaysbetopdog @topdog - thank you for your explanations, always a pleasure to see things explained. Everyday is a school day

@StatisticalSense yes that's true

It’s summer...

I read this too. The stronger strains of the virus die with the unfortunate people who succumb to Covid so the weaker strains are left so eventually the strains that are left are the weaker ones which circulate more successfully. Viruses only seek to infect and not die with the host so the stronger strains shouldn’t last as long, hopefully.

Does anyone remember at the start of all this seeing this prediction from the 90s that there will be a global pandemic in 2020 and then it will mysteriously disappear as fast as it appeared??

Yes it’s weird isn’t it. I’m not remotely into woo. But this lady. Can’t recall who she is wrote a book years ago saying that the world would be gripped by a respiratory illness in 2020 and that it would just disappear leaving everyone confused, before re appearing ten years later, and then never to be seen again.

It does seem there is an element of truth in it.

if the virus mutates, doesn’t that just mean there’s a different strain in circulation as well as the (for instance) more deadly strain? Surely the virus doesn’t mutate in every carrier at the same time?