Lock Down or Die Hard
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Well according to the research it seems you can lock down hard and still die hard. So might as well Boogie Nights.
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Lock Down 3: This is the Real Shit
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I think I prefer “Live Free or Die Hard”
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A basic grasp of the way natural selection works would suggest the following:
- The organism’s goal is to survive and reproduce.
- The “older” version of the virus was incapable of sustaining its population and therefore failed to thrive with the control measures imposed.
- The “updated” version has no problem reproducing under “lockdown” conditions, and therefore successfully out-competed V1.0
They suggest nothing of the sort. One would expect further dramatic “control” measures to force the emergence of an even more aggressive variant, assuming the virus is inherently capable of such an upgrade.
You are right- the repetitive switching between lockdown and opening is producing periods of selective pressure on the virus followed by periods where the virus population can recover, it’s like a perfect perti dish experiment for natural selection.
I think the UK really missed the opportunity to get the virus under control in the summer instead of trying to bring normalcy back as soon as possible. It’s now left with the situation it is in. Unfortunately, I don’t think the UK has much choice apart from the stricter measures they are applying now in the hope of keeping the death rates down until the vaccine can be deployed.
On the subject of natural selection, I think there is also risk once the population is partially vaccinated, once those who are vulnerable have been protected, and when there is mixing of younger people with the virus still endemic and those who are vaccinated. There will be opportunities for virus mutations from the endemic population to re-infect those who have the antibodies from the vaccine.
In other words the vaccine will stop working.
I don’t think anybody disagrees with that line of thought, but hope springs eternal.
Exactly the same line of thought has led to the ever-increasing application of pesticides, herbicides, and associated technology to agriculture. If we don’t do it, so the argument goes, NATURE WILL WIN, and the crops will all be destroyed, and then we’ll all die. But it’s wrong, and it’s wrong because the underlying axioms are wrong:
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“Nature hates humans and wants to wipe us out”. This is stupid. Nature is an anthropomorphic personification and doesn’t care about humans one way or the other. But we’ve developed a habit of doing stuff which, given the way things work, is unlikely to succeed, and then we rage against the Universe when it … doesn’t succeed.
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“We can beat nature; and we must”. We cannot beat Nature. At a basic physical level, Nature can muster a power output several orders of magnitude larger than we can. She can go nuclear on us without even batting an eyelid, and she will do that if we try to upset the applecart. Not because she hates us, but simply because that’s the way the machinery is set up.
It turns out that when you accept the way things work you can usually turn it to your advantage. Nature demands her cut, but she offers a generous exchange. Accept that the bugs and the bacteria and the viruses are there, and arrange things such that they can achieve their biological aims without disrupting yours - or, at least, without wiping out your entire farm. I’m referring here to agriculture, but the same principle, I think, applies to human society. Trying to “control” coronavirus at this point is like trying to stop a Trent 900 by shoving a crowbar in the fan. In the narrow sense it will achieve the desired result, but not in a way you’re going to enjoy.
In other words, let it go. Understand why the problem occurred in the first place, and rearrange things so it doesn’t happen again. It’s abundantly clear, though, that humanity wants no truck with that sort of thinking. We’re going to keep doing this stuff until Nature decides to give us such a pounding that we don’t stand up again and cause trouble for a century or two.
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And the biggest irony, as many people now believe, is the virus escaped from a lab where they were dicking about with it trying to make a vaccine for a possible pandemic.
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Does the same apply for Small Pox, Polio and Measles?
Which is normal for respiratory viruses as they constantly mutate over time and are widely distributed . No doubt it’s a concern …
Fortunately
A) it doesn’t seem to mutate at the rate that influenza viruses mutate
B) we don’t have confirmation that the vaccine has lost effectiveness yet
C) there’s an absolute shitload of different vaccines in development
D) the beauty of mRNA vaccines is they can be tweaked very quickly to match the prevalent strain, yet the production process remains almost 100% the same
E) hopefully in the not to distance future there’ll be multi strain multi virus vaccines using some fancy nanoparticle tech
I’m not saying “never use technology”. I work with technology all the time, which is why I have a fairly good grasp of when it works and when it doesn’t.
I’m simply pointing out that:
(a) When you do use technology it must fit into the Big Picture. While polio, for example, was supposedly eradicated via vaccines, better hygiene and safe water supplies played a big part in making sure it stayed dead and buried. Same with most of humanities scourges.
(b) Pick your battles carefully. If you go head-on against Nature, in all probability you are gonna lose bigstyle. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and you certainly don’t bring a sharpened stick to a nuclear war. While Brianjones there is enamoured with humanity’s grasp of some clever new technology, Nature can use that technology to do whatever she likes. Our mRNA vaccines are caveman stuff in comparison to what she has up her sleeve.
Sure. You can carry on with the arms race for as long as you like. And eventually you will lose. And you will probably lose in a way that you didn’t expect - something will hit you from way out in left field.
What you describe is not only binary view of natures motives but also also a binary view of us, as Man, and nature, as Woman (Hey! but what if nature is a bloke, will it make it harder to embrace?). I tend to view it as a more amorphous dynamic system that everything on Earth is part of- plants, animals, people (as subset of animals), cars, factories, clouds, volcanoes, etc. It’s a very delicately balanced system and we (Humans) as individuals are minuscule however as a whole we have an immense sway in this system. This view is not as romantic a view as “us and nature intertwined”, but I think the simplification in the view results in a simplification of the attitudes towards current issues within the system (c.f. Climate Change).
On the subject of controlling nature, we have done it sometimes (eradicating Small Pox) and have been unable to other times (halting a Tsunami from our shores). For COVID, I believe it is in our power, with correct policies backed up with strong leadership that believes in these effect of the policies, to control it to an extent that we can minimize what is potentially a huge number of deaths, until a vaccine can be deployed.
FTFY
Well covid19 pandemic was very possibly caused, accidentally, by researchers going out and collecting samples and doing research. So yeah sometimes we give nature a helping hand against ourselves.
That’s not to say it couldn’t have jumped by regular human contact but we may have speeded up the process significantly .
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But COVID-19 isn’t dead and buried. And you just posted some research explaining why precisely those measures that you’re advocating have given rise to a virus that developed a workaround for them.
None of this is surprising. Scientists predicted it months ago.
Scientists predict all kinds of things.
I’d like to see how transmissible covid19 is compared to the other four endemic human coronaviruses. But maybe it’s not possible to directly compare as there’s very little existing immunity to this strain, unlike the other four.
We couldn’t predict how coronavirus will react to the lockdown accurately though.
The best example of this is influenza.
Basically nobody predicted it would be driven close to extinction in country after country due to anti covid measures. And influenza is possibly the most studied virus worldwide.
Well, it may have been more than that. But that’s why they were receiving US funding and support over the last five years.
What immunity is there to the four endemic coronaviruses that we term the common cold?
If we built up immunity to the common cold it wouldn’t exist.
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Cuo.
We probably gain partial immunity when children , likely to be a similar situation for covid19 given it doesn’t really affect them .
And we aren’t going to be reinfected quickly by the same strain that we were recently infected with.
But covid19 infects all fresh hosts with no antibodies or cellular immunity. That’s probably partly why it is incredibly transmissible .