So is COVID now less dangerous

[girlcrushonvillanelle]

Back during lockdown we saw the awful stories of front line health care workers and other key workers such as bus drivers sadly lose their lives due to COVID.

The case numbers and death numbers obviously still continue, but it seems to be the very vulnerable who are affected.

Don't get me wrong, i don't wish for anyone to die from this awful pandemic and I'm not suggesting that we lift restrictions just because it might be less dangerous. It was merely a thought for discussion.

But I have read that a virus does not aim to kill its victims, but just to spread as far as it can, and that many of our common viruses we have now started off similar many many years ago.

I wondered the exact same thing and am interested in the outcome of this thread OP

I also wonder whether that is why they are considering dropping the 2M rule, knowing that although the virus is still out there it is alot less dangerous and that the numbers will fall on their own.

I would be interested in the numbers of positive tests for people who are asymptomatic. I know they are testing alot of health care workers/carers etc regardless of whether they have symptoms.

It seems to have gotten lost along the way that a virus as an organism's MO is to replicate and infect as many hosts as possible. As it 'mutates' over time, it's more common for a virus to become less dangerous because if it kills the host it fails to infect more people. So...this makes sense. Hope this is what's happened.

Yes it doesn't want to kill you. Your its host. It needs you to live so it can live too.

I’m hoping that this is the case OP but I am well aware I could just be wishful thinking.

It would be great if the virus is now weaker. I guess more time will tell.

But I have read that a virus does not aim to kill its victims, but just to spread as far as it can, and that many of our common viruses we have now started off similar many many years ago

Yes, a virus’ only real purpose is to reproduce and propagate. If it kills its host on the way that’s just collateral damage to it, and neither a good nor bad thing, as long as it doesn’t stopping it from spreading.

A virus needs new bodies into which to spread into. If there’s a sufficient supply of these then it will simply continue and there’s no evolutionary pressure to mutate. A mutation will generally only occur that succeeds the original when the original
is under severe stress and isn’t able to spread effectively. The mutation finds a way around this (often by changing just enough to be immune to the antibodies that fight the original).

Should this occur, hopefully the new mutation is less deadly... mostly it is. It doesn’t care whether it is or isn’t; only that it can spread! It’s pure chance that the second wave of the Spanish flu was more deadly (and that only occurred once the first wave had burnt itself out, not while the first wave was still active).

However, the virus is nowhere near squeezed sufficiently for a mutation to be required to supersede it. Where this happens with flu, it’s due to a combination of herd immunity and warmer weather/more sunlight meaning is R falls well below 1 even with no social distancing or the like.

There have been studies that have shown that virus quantities in samples have reduced significantly in some places, such as Italy. However, I don’t think there’s any evidence this is down to biological change, but rather than testing in the early days was only of very ill patients with very high viral loads... now with much wider testing, assymptomatic and mildly symptomatic people are being tested who weren’t before, with these people having far lower viral loads generally.

Though I’d love to be proved wrong, I don’t believe we can count on a mutation to get us out of this any time soon.

Ps it may be sufficiently squeezed in some places to have almost eliminate the virus, but as this was due to heavy suppression, a mutation is unlikely to be able to succeed. Any that try just die off as well.

They are considering dropping the 2m rule to avoid another 1 million plus redundancies in the catering / hospitality businesses.

Coronavirus: Fear of second wave in Beijing after market outbreak www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-53034924

So this story about an outbreak in Beijing... the key thing I took away was out of 45 positive cases; none had any symptoms. Is there a strain that is losing its severity?!

We don't know if it's got 'less dangerous'.
Scientists have discovered a lot, such as some people being more susceptible than others. However, it's still very dangerous for some people.

Coronavirus: Fear of second wave in Beijing after market outbreak www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-53034924

BBC headline looks a bit sensationalist I think. 45 cases in a city with a population double that of London hardly constitutes another 'wave'. Especially as most if not all of those 45 cases are associated with one place. More of a 'spike' than a 'wave'.

I have read some articles saying likely it will mutate in to much less virulent strain, it may have done so already I guess.

There were 45 infections out of the first 500 of testing all the workers from the market.

How does the virus know that it's running out of hosts because it's too severe and killing people and that it therefore needs to mutate ?

Out today - Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar for Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

www.healthline.com/health-news/is-the-new-coronavirus-getting-weaker-what-to-know#Could-the-weather-have-a-role?

Really hope this is right

Read the article I've linked. He's very good - and Johns Hopkins was giving us quite a lot of the early info and playing with the data, so...

I don't see any strong evidence in that article. It says "Health experts say there’s no evidence the new coronavirus has mutated into a weaker version.".

Only in the sense that there are fewer people around to catch it from at the moment. This will soon change if we start ignoring the social distancing rules. It might well be true in theory that 1 meter is ok, but since a lot of people don't seem to know how far 2 meters is, I think this will just mean that people will not socially distance at all. After all, most of us can lean over and touch someone else within 1 meter.

Other coronaviruses don't mutate as flu vires do, so there's no reason to suppose COVID 19 has mutated.

There are scientists all over the world tracking changes in the virus's genome. It's actually mutating all the time in small ways but they haven't found any mutations yet that affect the way it behaves, e.g. makes it more or less infectious or makes people more or less ill. Derbygerbil explains why this might be - there isn't any evolutionary pressure.

Tracking these small, inconsequential changes enables scientists to understand how the virus has spread because they can trace back its 'family tree' from one area to another.

How does the virus know that it's running out of hosts because it's too severe and killing people and that it therefore needs to mutate ?

It doesn't. It doesn't know anything, it doesn't want anything, it has no aims. It's just a fancy self-replicating molecule, in some ways more akin to a computer virus than to anything with a brain.

Either a virus reproduces itself or it doesn't and if it doesn't it dies out.

Viruses randomly mutate in small ways all the time so there will always be loads and loads of very slightly different versions of a virus out there.

Imagine a virus that's always deadly. Some variations may kill the host faster than others and the differences might only be slight. As long as they all have a roughly equal chance of infecting a new host before killing the old one then none of them have an advantage.

If lots of people are dying too quickly to pass on the virus then the variations that kill their hosts a bit more slowly will have an advantage and will leave more descendants, carrying those mutations into the next generation. The variations that kill their hosts too quickly will die out and those mutations will be lost.

After a few generations most cases of the virus will be the slow-killing variety. At this point you could say the virus 'has mutated' to kill people slower.

This is a very simplistic explanation but in a nutshell, evolution is reproduction + random mutations + some sort of selection pressure - in this case, the host's tendency to die in response to the effects of the virus before it can be passed on.

That's a good article ohthegoats. The only bits I would take issue with are:

It’s worth noting that SARS — the coronavirus that struck in 2003 — mysteriously burnt out 7 to 8 months after it had been spreading.

Scientists still don’t understand how or why SARS died out.

SARS didn't 'mysteriously burn out' and scientists understand very well why it's not around any more. It was chased down and contained until it was eradicated through case finding, isolation, contact tracing and quarantine.

This was much easier to do for SARS than for covid-19 because SARS patients were not infectious until they had been unwell for several days whereas covid-19 patients are most infectious at the very start of symptoms and for up to 3 days before.

Even though it's more difficult for covid-19 this is still our best strategy for beating this virus or even just getting back to some version of 'normal' until there's a vaccine.

And:

With this new coronavirus, many people with infections are asymptomatic, making it difficult to blunt the spread of the virus and disease.

We don't know how many people with infections are truly asymptomatic (as opposed to pre-symptomatic). Estimates from different studies vary wildly from around 6% to over 40% and none of the data so far is very reliable.

Everything we know so far suggests that asymptomatic cases are not a huge driver of onward infection. Mostly because they are not coughing but also possibly because they have a lower viral load than symptomatic cases.

Almost every country in the world has encountered this virus now, presumably they all have asymptomatic cases, and the vast majority of countries have contained it much better than we have.

The reason we are finding it 'difficult to blunt the spread of the virus and disease' is not because there's some Great Unknown of asymptomatic cases, it's because we haven't bothered doing the necessary work.

The belief is now that asymptomatic people don't spread it. It is all sown to people with symptoms.

It hasn't got milder, just we know more about it now and are testing more people. The death rate seemed high as people with milder symptoms didn't know they had it. People were only tested in hospital, by which time that had it quite severely.

It would be fine for kids to go back to school, hope it will happen soon.

@Bakeachocolatecaketoday

No! What you’ve posted is dangerously misleading, and could lead to it spreading all over again if this became a common belief.

Assymptomatic people are those who never show symptoms... and some studies have shown they may not be very contagious.

The issue is with pre-symptomatic people - those who haven’t yet developed symptoms. Studies seem to be confident that these people are contagious, and is thought to be the main reason why it has spread so widely.

Please don’t think that someone needs to have a fever and be coughing over you for you to be at risk of infection.

Asymptomatic cases can spread the virus and there are well documented examples of this, although it appears to be much less common than transmission from people who have symptoms or who go on to develop symptoms in the few days after they test positive.

The only way to tell whether someone with no symptoms, who tests positive, is asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic is to wait and see whether they develop symptoms or not.

This virus is mostly spread through respiratory droplets. If someone has symptoms - is coughing and sneezing - they will spread a lot of droplets. But droplets can also be spread through singing, laughing and shouting, or even just through speaking and breathing normally.

So wear a face covering whenever you are close to others, especially indoors, because you might be infectious and not know. Even a cut up sock will catch a lot of your spit and snot droplets.

We don't yet know how likely children are to get infected or to pass it on. The vast majority of children get very mild symptoms or no symptoms which would suggest they are not shedding much virus, but for young children especially this must be balanced against their generally poor hygiene standards and their inability to socially distance.

We'd all love some certainty or hard and fast rules but there are none at this stage, just a careful balancing of risks, making allowances for a lot of unknowns, and different for each situation.

I don't think we can just say it's fine for kids to go back to school without a lot more data.

Nevertheless we need to make children's education, and all the other benefits they usually get through the school system, an absolute priority because there is no doubt that a huge number of children are greatly disadvantaged through not being at school. Education needs massive investment and it needs the best educational experts to come up with new ways of meeting our children's needs, which may not look anything like a traditional classroom but which also leave no children behind.

I don't have the answers but I can see a few 'known unknowns' we should be tackling.