Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
Do the old covid tests still work? Ive had this cold several times this year and always covid negative.
The answer is yes they are still as effective, dont let anyone here convince you otherwise. The base protein has not mutated and that is what is being checked when you do this chromatography style test.
Mind the expiration dates.
I simply had the worst sore throat I’ve ever had. No congestion. Then I lost my sense of smell for about 6 months. That was awful. Very grateful it came back.
So is there any real way to say if this is because of widespread vaccination or because the virus itself has lost some lethality genes
Not a scientist, but I'd guess mostly B, maybe helped along with some of A.
The goal of a virus is to replicate, and it does that better when it's less lethal
Just a very small correction- as with all biology, natural selection will drive a virus to replicate more effectively, that’s it. This does NOT mean a virus will automatically become less lethal over time. That’s an older hypothesis that scientists found was not in line with observation.
The newer hypothesis is known as “virulence-transmission trade-off”. The oversimplification of the idea is that if a mutation increases both transmission and virulence, it will also tend to be selected for. COVID is inconsistent with both hypotheses in certain ways though, so really predicting its virulence in the short or long term has proven difficult. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/
The old idea isn't wrong per se, lower lethality is a good survival trait. It just has to be weighed against the value of transmission, which would intuitively have a much higher value. In covid, the lethality rate is even less inpactful because it is contagious for a relatively long period before the host would suffer severe illness. But low lethality is still a good thing, and in such a widespread disease one would still expect that trait to become more pronounced eventually. That doesn't mean it necessarily would, statistically likely doesn't mean certain, especially if a particular mutation gave it a substantial bump to both traits it may never be selected out for example. But the current trend seems to be a result of this likelihood.
Lethality is only a significant limiter when the population decreases enough that the virus has significant oroblems finding bodies as hosts. The human population is global with freedom to move globally. Lethality was never a limiter for covid, and won't be without much higher Lethality rates.
Doubly so when it can cross species'. Covid could kill every person on the planet, not care two shits about it, and just hop over to deer, dogs, cats, rodents, etc.
I know it effects deer, so I'd suspect the rest of the ungulates. I wouldn't be surprised if it can effect a large swath of mammelia.
The “old idea” is actually baked into one of the parameters of the new model. It’s why I said the old hypothesis “was not in line with observation” rather than being “wrong”. It predicted some trends correctly, but failed to predict many others. Like all science, it needed to update as we gathered more info.
The “new” hypothesis also isn’t perfectly predictive of viral evolution, but it’s more accurate with the observed spread of other diseases. Like all models, it’ll get replaced eventually by something more powerful. Likely sooner rather than later specifically because COVID put a spotlight on a lot of holes in the idea.
Viruses don’t have goals. You are anthropomorphizing them. What viruses do is mutate. If mutations have more fitness, they will spread more effectively. That says nothing about mortality nor morbidity. With this disease it spreads in the early stage, which long before the person who has caught it either dies, recovers, gets long COVID, etc.
It's not anthropomorphizing, it's abstraction and it's incredibly common in evolutionary science to speak in this manner.
It helps that it already killed millions of the more susceptible early on before immunity started.
Not sure how statistically significant this is in the overall numbers, though.
Scheduled next boost for next week.
I finally caught it earlier this year. Thanks to vax, it was similar to a cold / flu. Was mostly better after a few days.
Medical science is awesome. I couldn't be happier about how it turned out. What a relief.
New vax wasnt approved on yet I thought..
Approved in the US and OZ that I've seen. Certainly others by now.
That was the basic progression when I had it a few months ago if you add fever and chills.
Huh, I have exactly that. Dunno if covid though of just some flu