This is getting at “saying the quiet part out loud.”
For a variety of reasons media and influential organizations have avoided considering the upper bound on virility and mortality (? Not sure the right term) of covid.
But to think delta is it would be some kind of miracle. It would mean we are going through the worst of it, and that after we handle delta globally, people can worry about other things.
But it doesn’t stand to reason that we are done here with covid. There are too many hotspots and I believe delta is older than most of the big ones right now.
How likely is a nasty new variant not pop out of Iran or India, or Texas?
What about variants created by non-human beings like rats? [1] Are we going to skate by on those? That would be great!
I suspect the public is not ready to fully address the breadth and depth of covid’s impact. I also speculate that the “booster” shot suddenly being prescribed is intended to help ward off future variants as much or more so than delta alone.
You probably mean "virulence", not "virility". The latter word denotes the masculine ability to procreate.
The confusion arises because the Latin word "vir" means "man" (specifically of male sex, as opposed to human), and the similar word "virus" means poison.
SARS-CoV-2 has multiple animal reservoirs, and that's one reason why it will be impossible to eradicate. But generally variants that evolve in animals will select for fitness in those different species. So those will probably have less impact on humans.
This is one piece of circumstantial evidence why some virologists suspect the virus was produced in a lab doing gain of function research using transgenic mice with human like respiratory systems. When the virus first appeared in Wuhan it was already really good at infecting humans. That would be unlikely if it had evolved in wild bats or pangolins and then jumped straight to humans. But we don't know for sure, maybe it was just natural bad luck with no lab involved.
> When the virus first appeared in Wuhan it was already really good at infecting humans. That would be unlikely if it had evolved in wild bats or pangolins and then jumped straight to humans. But we don't know for sure.
Just curious about this point - wouldn't this always be the case, since before it was good at infecting humans it would only be in a few if any of them? IE. My thinking is that even if it had existed for a while before that point, we'd be unlikely to know since it wasn't at that point good at infecting humans and thus not many had it.
SARS-CoV-2 is a generalist that can infect many animals. I doubt it a "lab leak". Studies of genetic sequences from around the Wuhan fish market showed that it had been circulating and mutated a bit for some time before it was detected.
For a variety of reasons media and influential organizations have avoided considering the upper bound on virility and mortality (? Not sure the right term) of covid.
But to think delta is it would be some kind of miracle. It would mean we are going through the worst of it, and that after we handle delta globally, people can worry about other things.
But it doesn’t stand to reason that we are done here with covid. There are too many hotspots and I believe delta is older than most of the big ones right now.
How likely is a nasty new variant not pop out of Iran or India, or Texas?
What about variants created by non-human beings like rats? [1] Are we going to skate by on those? That would be great!
I suspect the public is not ready to fully address the breadth and depth of covid’s impact. I also speculate that the “booster” shot suddenly being prescribed is intended to help ward off future variants as much or more so than delta alone.
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/researchers-find-covid...