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by standardsam 1609 days ago
>this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.

Can you back this up? It's my understanding that our actions now have almost no bearing on what happens with future variants.
3 comments
feurio 1609 days ago
I would imagine that it's a fairly simple matter of probability:

The more cases the greater the chance of mutations. The more mutations the greate the chance of nasty variant.

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afavour 1609 days ago
The broad logic is more infections = more variants. Which makes sense in a purely statistical way, since variants are happened upon by chance on infection.
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standardsam 1609 days ago
It seems the messaging from the experts is different in the US and the UK. The message in the UK broadly is: expect to be infected with COVID multiple times throughout your life, vaccination and prior infection should protect you from serious illness.
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csours 1609 days ago
The chart shown at time code 7:55 https://youtu.be/FYIeL8XxluQ?t=476 is the best representation I've seen of this.

One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.

But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.

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afavour 1609 days ago
That's probably the more realistic expectation. Especially when the west is doing very, very little to help curb infections elsewhere in the world. Until they become interested in that there will always be a fresh supply of variants arriving.
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immibis 1609 days ago
Heck, the west isn't even doing very much to help curb infections in the west.
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rob_c 1609 days ago
no, this can't be backed up, not even with models which post-hoc 'describe' other outbreaks of other diseases/virii outbreaks
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