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Comment by sjg007 | Hacker News Reader

Just wait until it mutates and starts killing kids. Kids are currently the last to be vaccinated. I know this is morbid but this does not bode well but there is precedent. Spanish flu first only killed the elderly and then on its return killed young adults and kids disproportionately. Now the Spanish flu was influenza and this is coronavirus but this specific coronavirus should not be underestimated. I’ve said this from the beginning and I hope I’m wrong.

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There’s no evidence that it’s more deadly at this time.

In the words of Derek Lowe...

“Many infectious pathogens, in fact, gradually evolve versus a given animal host to be more infectious and less virulent over time. Remember, it’s not the job of a virus to make people deathly ill: it’s the job of a virus to make more virus.”

I have found myself concerned about this as well (and thinking about what decision-making for parents must have been like in late summer when this characteristic started to become evident).

Ask yourself: if you're that parent, do you wish that your kid had already been exposed and run a complete course of the virus prior to this mutation?

It seems obvious that the answer is 'yes', and, at least to my way of thinking, is an indictment of the purely horizontal approach to pandemic control so far displayed by states.

Well OC43 has been around for over a century and never mutated to start killing kids. So why would this be virus do that? Your speculation seems uninformed.

There's speculation that an ancestor strain to OC43 was in fact the cause of the 1898 pandemicinstead of influenza.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_coronavirus_OC43

> I’ve said this from the beginning

Is that relevant and who are you?

It's just a figure of speech

It's just a low effort rhetorical device where the speaker hopes to boost their signal. Much like "I don't normally say this but."

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