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Comment by SuoDuanDao | Hacker News Reader

I kind of skimmed the article, was there a mention of the mortality or long-haul rate that I might have missed? Since viruses mutate to become less deadly with time, we would expect later variants to be less dangerous than earlier ones. Without knowing the mortality rate of Omicron it's hard to do any useful risk analysis.

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The effect that viruses mutate to become less deadly over time only counts for a specific subset of viruses.

The evolutionary goal for a virus is to have more copies of itself. Killing a patient 3 days after infecting them is a poor strategy for this, so the only option for these kinds of super deadly viruses is either kill a population outright and die out with the population (dead people don't spread viruses), OR if the virus is lucky it will mutate into a less deadly variant to be able to spread to more people.

The specific subset of viruses that will evolve to become less deadly have two properties:

1) They kill quickly

2) They kill most people

The problem with Covid is that it doesn't have these properties. It's only deadly for approximately 1% of the population, so it will continue spreading even if it ends up killing the host, because for every 100 people only 1 has stopped spreading.

The other problem is that Covid doesn't kill quickly, if I recall correctly, most people die after week 2-3. Covid will spread even before the host is symptomatic, so again there is no evolutionary advantage to mutate away this trait.

1) if people with mild or no symptoms keep moving among the population, but people with severe symptoms stay at home, then there would be a strong evolutionary pressure to cause milder symptoms

2) "dead people don't spread viruses"...UNLESS it's a zombie virus

Your 1) only matters if transmission is related to symptoms. If the virus is transmissible for a while before the symptoms like Covid, symptom severity matters less (pre-symptom R-value gains outweigh post-symptom R-value losses). Reductively, if you’ve already infected your social circle pre-symptoms, what happens next is much less relevant to the virus’ lifecycle.

Even if symptoms don't impact transmission directly, if you're out circulating in the population (as opposed to self-isolating or in the hospital), you'll be able to infect more people.

Unless, of course, self-isolation or quarantine are entirely ineffective, which is not totally out of the question but I think people staying at home probably do spread it at least a bit less than people headed to the grocery store.

The mildness or severity of symptoms is determined after the period of maximum contagiousness.

What you are talking about sounds nice in theory but it doesn’t really add up based on how this virus works. If anything there is a pretty strong argument the other way… a more contagious version of covid will probably have a higher viral load and this probably lead to higher chance of serious disease be (like delta).

Viruses don't necessarily become less deadly over time. That's just a frequent side effect of natural selection. Living people without debilitating symptoms are better spreaders. But the COVID virus already tends to be spreadable before the illness peaks.

But yeah, other than the virus flaming out completely, the second best scenario is an extremely mild variant dominating and yielding immunity to all the others.

I tend to disagree. I think we have it wrong when we think of infected or not. I think the reality of it is many slight exposures over periods of time where people's bodies have higher immunity and lower immunity towards things. For example if I am breathing covid at a rate of 5% of everyone else and I don't get "infected" but I get a few particles that replicate but don't take hold - I probably will get labeled one of the "asymptomic" folks. Compare that to someone that get's a mouth full of it - will probably get sick because of the viral load.

When there's a crap-ton of it in the air, even without a mask say at a public park where you're standing far away from someone - someone's covid particles are probably being inhaled - again, since the virus is now "everywhere" it offers a chance for more people to get that slight infection that doesn't take hold. And I say slight because while there's a lot, it's spread over a a large area due to wind, so it's like getting a 1% infection instead of the 100% indoor infection.

there’s not a ‘crap-ton’ of (active) covid floating around in the air, super-especially not outside. the virus is relatively fragile and falls apart rapidly due to a variety of natural and man-made forces. moreover, outside, there is a shit-ton of air for the virus to dissipate into far away from any and all people. active virus can only really concentrate to threshold infectious levels when in face-to-face conversation due to continuous exposure of active virus (before it falls apart due to external forces).

with that said, yes, getting a lot of under-threshold exposure can build immunity without getting sick (i.e., asymptomatic infection). this is a mechanism that’s often used by our bodies to develop novel disease resistance, but has been suppressed for public discussion for largely mediopolitical reasons.

I don't think it's suppressed. Who hasn't heard about viral load at this point? It's just poorly understood.

it’s not just ignorance. many people find the idea that ‘exposure to a little viral load trains the immune system without overloading it’ to be a very dangerous one worthy of suppression, even though it’s common and natural, because it throws into question the rhetoric buttressing current mandates. it’s never even whispered by democrats or their sympathetic media, for example. folks highly supportive of mandates, evidenced by voting/moderation patterns here and on social media, as another.

It's not being suppressed. Policy needs to have a basis in research and scientific consensus, and my understanding is that there is not currently a great deal of research on exposure to small amounts of virus on humans, in real life conditions. For one thing, there are major ethics and safety issues to studying this. For another, viruses don't all behave the same.

It's too early to say, but the on-the-ground anecdotal reports suggest it is not particularly severe or lethal, based on observations so far. But it will take weeks to start knowing about mortality and months to see evidence of long illness.

The best case scenario is that the mutations that make it more infectious also make it less virulent/lethal, and the super-early evidence suggests that is at least possibly true of this variant.

Severe illness and hospitalizations lag infections by weeks, so the initial data is biased.

Deaths lag on the order of two months.

While true, its highly unlikely Omicron actually exploded into existence in the last 2 weeks. It's likely been circulating for months and we've just now discovered it.

I wrote "weeks to start knowing about mortality".

Obviously, more time will bring more complete knowledge.

    > Deaths lag on the order of two months

Pure BS.

People clearly don’t die immediately after infection. Consider that most people dying in North America were being kept alive on a ventilator.

Not sure why a two month lag is so hard to believe.

Those people would be classified as hospitalized inside two months though.

Do predators mutate to the point where they live in symbiosis with prey? No. Not always. While symbiosis exists it is erroneous to think that this is always the outcome. In fact, in biology cooperation is just a side effect. Competition is the norm.

Every biological entity on the face of the earth only cooperates because it helps them better compete.

Viruses simply diversify through mutation. They can be more or less infectious, more or less deadly, etc in any combination and selection pressure over the long term tends to lead to less deadly more infectious variants dominating. In the mean time more dangerous variants can do a lot of damage.

What the Spanish Flu, most deaths occurred in the second and third waves from more virulent and deadly variants.

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