This is one of the serious dangers with the idea of letting the virus run wild to achieve herd immunity: you create a lot of animal reservoirs.
Though minks do seek way riskier than average.
Though minks do seek way riskier than average.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/24/6/17-2114_article
You’re right about livestock more generally though. Avian and swine livestock also pose a huge risk for pandemic disease. But Mustelidae do as well.
Minks are closely related with Ferrets, one of the "not really rare" but "neither really uncommon" domestic pets. Domesticated ferrets communicate by licking and gently biting humans and other ferrets, and live in the same room as us.
Over-fitting.
A virus "trained" on multiple species is targeting biology that is ubiquitous in higher life. The wider range of species a disease can infect, the less likely an individual member of a species is to have genetic variation that leaves it not susceptible to the disease, and the worse an outbreak is likely to be.
With zero response - ie. what we do for influenza - we establish herd immunity over a short, sharp period, and the virus immediately falls over.
In any case, even if this mink-mutant variant is slightly deadlier, the data from Sweden shows that COVID deaths can be effectively reduced to near-zero from basic herd immunity strategies - Sweden yesterday recorded a single COVID death. So it makes sense to adopt the Swedish approach now, for a variant of the virus we know how to treat.
You would be objectively wrong? Basic reasoning would tell you that places with less cases have a lower probability of transmitting the disease to animal reservoirs and risking harmful mutations coming back at us.
>With zero response - ie. what we do for influenza - we establish herd immunity over a short, sharp period, and the virus immediately falls over.
This is also incorrect? We take a number of proactive actions against the flu every year, from vaccination, to other public health and treatment measures, to even more drastic steps like culling livestock populations where more dangerous strains have emerged.
>So it makes sense to adopt the Swedish approach now, for a variant of the virus we know how to treat.
We don't actually have any idea about the consequences of this mutation, especially in a larger population, so we should do the exact opposite and proceed with extreme caution until its risk profile is understood.
Can we please address this fact that scares a lot of us? We already know the death rate is low for groups that are not at risk but it seems even healthy people are suffering from "long COVID" with serious long term implications.
There is almost no evidence of either in mild-to-moderate cases of Covid-19 (i.e. the vast majority of cases). People who have been on ventilators, or hospitalized for extended periods due to severe illness are a different story, as ventilators themselves often cause lung damage. The scariest anecdotes that have been widely circulated online have come from ventilated or hospitalized patients with severe illness.
Beyond these anecdotes, stories of "long covid" thus far are predominantly based on anecdote and self-reporting of symptoms, and the symptom profiles that you hear are frequently vague and/or unverifiable ("brain fog") and in most cases, not significantly different than you might see with any respiratory virus.
For example, here is a report from the CDC that was widely reported as evidence that "35% of covid cases had long-term illness". However, "long-term" here, is defined as "three weeks", and "illness" was defined as a spectrum of mild symptoms that resemble any flu-like illness, such as fatigue, cough and congestion:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm
Even more specific studies have had serious problems. There have been a few reports of cardiac inflammation and other specific clinical signs in otherwise healthy people. To date, most of these have been debunked for statistical problems. For example, it was widely reported that Division I athletes were found to have heart inflammation after mild Covid-19 infections, which led the Big10 to start screening athletes with MRI before play. Subsequently, so few abnormalities have been found that doctors are now calling for the rule to be rescinded:
https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/28/big-ten-covid-protocol...
https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/cs_srgb/MTc2NDI1M...
In short, the science of "long-term covid" exceptionally poor, and I caution you that most of what you're reading online is rumor and speculation.
For the previous SARS pandemic I believe it was about half of every infected person who developed long term respiratory problems. This strain shares around 80% of its genome with the previous SARS-1 strain.
Governments seem more keen on burning an uncountable amount of money on dubious PCR testing instead of treating or at least debunking any concerns of long term issues.
Its obvious that MY government really has no clue what they are doing. They have given themselves absolute power in this state of emergency, they make decisions and then announe them before other parties have a chance to say anything about the material handed to them. First our government sold The state serum institute to a rediculous low price to some sheikh from Saudi Arabia, and now they pay BILLIONS every month to that very same company and take all the advice they give as unconditional fact.
But fact is they are a private company with a stake in government funded PCR testing.
You tell us an anecdote about how you are experiencing problems after you were sick in December.
I’m pretty sure you didn’t get tested for Corona in December but anyway I don’t see how that justifies scaremongering about ‘a lot of cases’ where people have longlasting damage. Again, if it is so pronounced and affects so many people it shouldn’t be hard to show.
My point is that governments do NOT want to address the ARDS concerns because it will mean millions of citizens will have to get early pensions, which will be a massive strain on welfare states. They'd rather not address this at all. My other point is that we have reached a point where PCR testing is utterly meaningless, it SOLELY benefits big pharma.
It makes no sense to keep on doing PCR testing, we should have done like china when shtf there and started doing symptom diagnostics instead since its way cheaper.
Also, if you need a respirator to breathe, you need it COVID or not. If you are sick, it doesn't really matter if its SARS-2, covid-20 or the flu. Stay home!
https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden
People love to bring up Sweden but they have never experienced dealing with COVID-19 in winter where it is up to 20x more contagious as everyone moves indoors.
That is incorrect. Sweden is currently seeing about 2,000 cases a day, and 5 deaths a day (7-day moving averages):
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
Today, they had thirteen deaths, nationwide, which was a statistically abnormal spike. The previous day was 1.
The IHME site you are linking is reporting the output of a model, not actual data on deaths.