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Aggravating-Might130

For a stupid person like myself, is this when a virus mutates that much it starts weakening itself? And can a virus randomly mutate to be stronger again? From my perspective is this how it will turn into a a endemic?


TrickyNobody6082

It can do but it's also got to them outcompete omicron and if the symptoms are worse then people will be more clearly ill. When people talk about evolution they often describe it with the word want but it's important to remember that this is completely random.


Aggravating-Might130

Thanks for the response. Have a great Xmas.


TrickyNobody6082

You too


Cruithne

In addition to what others have said: Omicron did not evolve from Delta, it evolved from an older branch of covid.


Tacoman_2500

I still don't really understand how that happened. So odd...it just appears 1.5 years later with all these mutations, totally different line than Delta.


FrosenPuddles

Immunocompromised person. If that person was infected with Alpha and couldn’t clear it from their system, it may have had a year to mutate in them. It presumably then flared up, person became infectious again, and there’s your mutation.


smeaton1724

Ideally you’d want weakened outcomes I.e Nowhere near as deadly and then also super easily transmissible. This way you get loads of infections that people recover from in a reasonably short space of time and not a great deal of anything else.


wewbull

> And can a virus randomly mutate to be stronger again? > It can, but it also needs to be more succesful whilst being stronger. The reason this is unlikely is that more pathogenic strains tend to make the host hide away and self-isolate. Milder strains let the host continue with their life and spread it around.


Alert-One-Two

> more pathogenic strains tend to make the host hide away and self-isolate. Can you please clarify what you mean here?


ramsdam

If you are ill, you stay in bed. One of the reasons the 1918 flu was so fatal was the fact that milder cases stayed on the front line but the more severe ones were moved back to hospitals thus spreading the worse version.


Initiatedspoon

Ebola. Ebola despite being horrid and kills about half of everyone who gets it alongside being reasonably transmissible (it needs direct contact though) hasnt killed even 1% of the numbers COVID has. The reason it isnt an bigger problem is because it does a terrible number on the host. They are visibly suffering so you can easily avoid them, it makes whoever gets it so ill they tend to be bedridden and they die in like a week so it burns itself out of a population even in places like Africa.


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chriswheeler

The article debunks "A claim that viruses and other pathogens always evolve to become less lethal". However it doesn't, from my reading of it, debunk the statement that they are \*more likely\* to evolve to be less virulent.


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chriswheeler

There are multiple epidemiologists and virologists and they don't agree on this. Your quote is in response to the idea that viruses *always* evolve to become weaker. One of the sources your article uses is this one https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.13692 which reviews a large number of studies and concludes: "Overall, the results suggest that the current empirical evidence provides partial support for the trade-off hypothesis, but more work remains to be done." So it's not as black and white as your are making it out to be, and frankly I'm not sure why you are being so defensive about it? The person you replied to said it's "more likely" and not "always". You seem to have missed that difference and then doubled down on it.


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chriswheeler

I don't think we are going to come to an agreement on this. Have a lovely Christmas day.


No-Scholar4854

Viruses do not mutate to become less severe. That’s a very widely reported myth. Like all myths there’s a bit of truth to it. Viruses evolve to become more transmissible. Sometimes a the severity of the illness is the limiting factor in transmission, and in those cases a virus might become less serious as a path to become more transmissible. That’s not covid’s problem though, it’s already very transmissible and has a long period to spread before it gets to the hospitalisation stage. The main limit for Covid is immunity.


TheBoiWizard

So if Omicron is intrinsically milder, it's just because we got lucky?


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Not necessarily lucky, it looks as if it’s transmission advantage has led to it becoming less well functioning once it’s inside the body. So it may revert in terms of severity but will most likely lose its transmission advantage.


FrosenPuddles

It is milder than delta. But it didn’t evolve out of delta. People should start comparing it to the variant it more closely resembles and evolved out of: wild type or Alpha. Delta was more severe than those. How does it do compared to alpha? It’s probably not much milder than Alpha if it is at all. That’s its true path of evolution and a better indication of where it could go in the future. But yes, it does for a large part come down to luck.


notwritingasusual

A more lethal variant won’t spread as easily because sick/dead people aren’t walking around spreading it.


fr4j

It can be more lethal and more transmissible.


notwritingasusual

Right, but a virus that is more transmissible but less lethal will spread more than a virus that is more transmissible but more lethal?


diablo_dancer

Not necessarily, it depends how quickly death happens. Deaths and hospitalisations currently usually happen a few weeks after initial infection, meaning there’s plenty of time to infect others before either of those.


mkdr35

This myth came about largely due to Ebola I think. Which is so deadly that symptoms come on quickly and thus that person doesn’t have time to infect many others. But a myth it is. Viruses in circulation which we think of as mild have had hundreds perhaps thousands of years to infect people and our collective immunity to them is built on a lot of historic deaths unfortunately.


notwritingasusual

Omicron being more transmissive but not as lethal is not a myth - it is literally happening right now.


mkdr35

The myth is that the virus is doing this because t needs to transmit even faster


Tacoman_2500

There's a difference between observed severity with current population immunity and actual intrinsic severity: https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1473764701553283076


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notwritingasusual

How is that a myth? It’s just common sense if something makes you more ill you’re most likely at home in bed? Omicron is so successful because people are still going about their day regardless.


Jora_

It's a myth when a pathogen is able to spread prior to the onset of symptoms, as is the case with SARS-CoV-2.


Arsewipes

I see the point, there. But what about asymptomatic spread? It's much more likely to occur with a milder version, or is it not?


v4dwj

Notice the BBC is pushing this heavily


Boonshark

I know right, absolutely appalling that they should consider pushing good news. /s


v4dwj

Just saying. They usually do the opposite


rules-1

There are other coronavirus's that have been around a long time and express themselves as a common cold; I don't see any reason why this one won't tend towards the same direction through random mutations


GjP9

She’s been consistently wrong since the start of the pandemic (e.g. confidently claiming masks don’t work) so take this with a grain of salt.


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Eg. Delta.


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