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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we're going to find in the future that Influenza will have been replaced by a variant of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), the disease spreads the same way, and outcompetes the flu in every way, furthermore, our public health response for CoV-2 (Masking, Quarantine, Isolation, etc) also impacts flu (probably disproportionately), and flu unlike CoV-2 is truly seasonal.

So we may have eradicated flu, by simply replacing it with a much more fearsome illness.

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Since COVID doesn't cause immunity to the flu, it can't outcompete the flu. You can, in fact, get both at the same time. Flu cases may be down due to anti-COVID measures, but it hasn't been eradicated. There is plenty of flu still circulating.

Edit: Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2021-2022/image...

There was effectively zero flu in Winter of 2020, it remains to be seen how much flu there will be in Winter of 2021, but since the same precautions one would take for COVID also stop flu. Beyond that, anytime anyone shows flu like symptoms they're almost automatically sent home for 5 days, until they get a clean COVID test, which basically stops flu cold in its tracks, this is how you end up irradiating something.

> this is how you end up irradiating something.

“eradicating”, and that's still wrong because influenza A has nonhuman reservoir populations, and anti-COVID measure may reduce spread in the human population but they aren't going to eliminate the reservoirs.

Flu is increasing again this winter. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2021-2022/image...

I can tell you right now from having gone through 2 colds in the last month due to kids, that competition in the marketplace of cold viruses is working. lots of competing products to acquire.

Same here.

This is our 5th endemic coronavirus. They tends to mutate into less lethal more viral over time. Check out the newest varient out of South Africa which looks promising for a healthy future.

Prior coronavirus species tend to evolve toward non-lethality because their peak transmission coincides with peak symptoms. Covid-19 is not like that and so has no evolutionary push towards non-lethality.

A variant of COVID as lethal as MERS would spread just as well since carriers are asymptomatic most of the time they are infecting others.

I agree that asymptomatic transmission reduces this pressure, but symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers are often still contagious, and there is more public will to enact extreme precautions for more lethal illnesses.

So there is still some evolutionary benefit for lower lethality.

I'm trying not to read too much into the new variant yet, there isnt enough data to form a meaningful conclusion. But hope springs eternal. ;-)

Coronaviruses won't outcompete the flu for the same reason ants don't outcompete shrimps.

> Coronaviruses won't outcompete the flu for the same reason ants don't outcompete shrimps.

So, coronaviruses and influenza viruses have nonoverlapping habitats?

That's not the reason why ants don't outcompete shrimps. Does it help if I say shrimps and whales?

> That's not the reason why ants don't outcompete shrimps

Yes, it is.

> Does it help if I say shrimps and whales?

No, because shrimp and whales also mostly don't compete because they have largely non overlapping habitat within the ocean (and actually are otherwise more “potentially competitive”, if you pick the right ones of each, since both many shrimp and some whales eat krill, for instance.)

This is a case where it is probably better to just make your argument directly than to rely on analogy, I suspect.

It will be interesting to see if CoV-2 has significant seasonality in the long term. We see numbers going up as parts of the US tend to spend more time inside (in the summer for southern states, or like around now, in winter for northern states), but once it becomes just an ordinary part of life, maybe the reduction of precautions will make cases more evenly distributed.

Yeah, I'm curious about that myself, I've been watching it very carefully.

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