Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

No one still thinks Covid is ever going away, right? It's likely something we'll just have to deal with like the flu. For one thing, there are now Covid-19 reservoirs in various animal populations.

It's hard to say how this will evolve but there's a lot of evolutionary pressure on viruses to become more transmissible and less deadly. Why less deadly? Because a virus that is too deadly will likely die. It's why the Spanish flu is now just H1N1.

This isn't guaranteed and will no doubt join the ranks of many other anti-vaxxer straw man arguments alongside "you said the vaccine was forever", "you said the vaccine would stop transmission", "people with the vaccine still can get Covid", "people with the vaccine can still die" and so on.

It's actually quite depressing how staggeringly selfish, wildly irrational and willfully ignorant so many people are. I don't mean just being ignorant. I mean taking pride in that ignorance. Particularly in the US, it seems the anti-intellectual chickens have come home to roost in droves.

Seeing all of this I really hope there's no one out there who believes for a second that the world as a whole will sacrifice anything or even mildly inconvenience themselves when it comes to addressing climate change. It's never going to happen.

Like there are still people who believe the millions that have been killed is fake news and part of some media conspiracy.

So, I see a future with annual Covid shots just like annual flu shots. I'm personally beyond caring if any individual chooses not to get one. We've blunted the initial onslaught of a novel disease appearing in a population of >7 billion with no natural immunity (albeit at the cost of millions of lives). At this point, it's now evolution in action.

> Like there are still people who believe the millions that have been killed is fake news and part of some media conspiracy.

Without going into the medical and scientific reasons why this perception may exist among people, I'd just like to point out that trust in the media and other institutions has been sabotaged over the last 5-6 years among a non-trivial percentage of the population, perhaps permanently, just for the sake of political victory.

The lesson that these institutions should learn is a self-reflective critical one that they'll forever refuse to acknowledge. Don't cry wolf repeatedly for years and then complain that the ignorant villagers won't believe literally anything you have to say on any topic ever again.

> It's hard to say how this will evolve but there's a lot of evolutionary pressure on viruses to become more transmissible and less deadly.

I'd like to think so but I fear there's no selective pressure with regards to decreased lethality for COVID-19. An infected person has already spread it far and wide by before they even develop symptoms – if they die after spreading, where's the pressure?

> Why less deadly? Because a virus that is too deadly will likely die. It's why the Spanish flu is now just H1N1.

The Spanish flu mutated into a deadlier strain first.

It can and will be eradicated, and eventually the flu along with it (which was already a high research priority before Covid). Just not soon.

With the heat death of the universe, sure.

Honest question, how could it ever be eradicated when people actively aren’t willing to cooperate?

The optimist in me hopes that today's anti-vaxxers are just the current incarnation of Luddites. We've had resistance to new ideas for probably the entirety of human history. I mean Galileo was persecuted for heresy. Irrational dogma eventually fades into history.

We can but hope.

If the reproduction rate is kept low enough for an extended time, the virus eventually extinguishes itself. With vaccination, "self-vaccination" among the uncooperative, sanitation, testing, contact tracing, and some fraction of the population continuing to take personal measures, the combination can bring the rate down low enough.

people don’t just flip a coin and say “heads, i won’t cooperate”. they all have their own reasons for not cooperating. very few of those reasons are “i flat out don’t want this virus to be eradicated”. so address their concerns, and problem solved.

i’m not claiming it’ll be easy, and i don’t think it’s practical within the short span of a few years, but it’s not impossible.

> Why less deadly? Because a virus that is too deadly will likely die. It's why the Spanish flu is now just H1N1.

Given how slowly SARS-CoV-2 kills you (if it does), there isn't any selection pressure to do it less often.

Indeed, my understanding is that no human virus has evolved to become less virulent. It is unclear why H1N1 disappeared a few years after it emerged as the Spanish flu, most likely it simply ran out of susceptible hosts. In particular, we have no evidence of a successor virus, evolved from H1N1, that was both less virulent and drove out H1N1 at that time.

I agree that annual shots are a very real possibility. I also share your pessimism about our response to global warming.

Think about it this way: what is the evolutionary pressure for it to become more lethal? Particularly if we accept your premise that such lethality occurs after it spreads.

Now a given strain may mutate to become more deadly but why would such a strain become dominant?

Even if all this occurs after the virus can spread, consider the human reaction to it. You have two diseases: one is essentially the common cold, the other is basically Ebola. Even if those events occur after transmission, the response to each disease is going to be wildly different. The common cold will just be tolerated and managed. There will be no lockdowns. The second will have the military enforcing lockdowns and curfews combined with hard travel borders and checkpoints. There would be forced vaccination in some places and severe restrictions on the voluntarily unvaccinated.

Just the human reaction alone will tend to make the common cold version more dominant over a sufficiently long time frame.

I don't think it quite works like that - human reaction would affect the transmission of both the original 'bad' variant, and a hypothetical 'good' variant equally. It wouldn't induce a selection pressure favouring one over the other.

Furthermore, even with ICUs overflowing, a large segment of the population considers it 'just the flu' - and likely still would even if it became more virulent. After all, their assessment is based on ideology, party affiliation etc rather more than cold facts.

> Indeed, my understanding is that no human virus has evolved to become less virulent. It is unclear why H1N1 disappeared a few years after it emerged as the Spanish flu, most likely it simply ran out of susceptible hosts. In particular, we have no evidence of a successor virus, evolved from H1N1, that was both less virulent and drove out H1N1 at that time.

Spanish flu is still around and did become less virulent over time - and it has descendants that comingled with other flus to create other pandemics: https://www.history.com/news/1918-flu-pandemic-never-ended

Indeed H1N1 has popped up from time to time, with varying outcomes, not least as prior immunity waned. We are also much better at treating people, particularly bacterial coinfections.

Flu is a bit peculiar with viral RNA/DNA (I forget which) reassortment. However it did not fade out or transmute at the end of the 1918 pandemic due to a selection pressure to become less lethal (or at least, we have no evidence that that is the case)

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