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my answer
I use your by default mostly because I type to fast and dont review what I write. Couple that with the fact that i got into the habit by typing on my phone where an apostrophe is a bit tedious. That particular error, as most of my errors, are largely due to not caring and typing as fast as I can since i dont find the medium to be critical for correctness.
My formal writeups, as well as my blogs, tend to have very few errors since I proof read them.
That said my natural rate of errors has been unusually high the last 2 years since my injury and COVID largely due to the extremely high levels of stress I've been under which seems to effect the prevelance.
When spell-checkers came out, it was a godsend for me. If I left my spelling mistakes in my writing, you wouldn't be able to make out half of what I was saying, it's so bad.
A lot times I can't find the words in the dictionary because I can't spell it close enough to find it. I use Google a lot now because they have AI/phonetics algorhtms.
(I left that last word misspelled, just so you could see how I tried to spell it unassisted so you get a feel what I face with this issue. It's a real pain.)
@Pat Actually the idea that more lethal viruses are less of a thread isnt actually true. For example if a virus kills 100% of victims but takes 30 days to do it it will still spread quite a bit if it is contagious enough.
I debated this some months back and if you look at a comparison between R0 and morality they arent really strongly correlated at all.
>...if a virus kills 100%, social distancing might actually be followed more tightly, lessening the spread
Yes, human behavior is a big part of it. With diseases like ebola with all of the bleeding, or small pox with the facial deformities, those diseases probably spread less than they would otherwise because people take them more seriously.
Long before we even had a vaccine I mentioned that vaccines would fail no matter how many people were on board, and surprise surprise, it played out almost exactly the way I claimed.
There is a reason we have never had a successful vaccine to any coronavirus class virus in existance. Every vaccine we tried never made it to market due to the exact sorts of problems we are seeing
@freemo Have you considered the need for boosters in your equation, though? Long covid and risk of needing hospitalization so far seems to have decreased hugely with the vaccine.
The current ones needing hospitalization despite being vaccinated are the ones who got vaccinated the first in the timeline, and also very usually are either elderly or have more ailments than just this virus. They're highly due for boosters now.
That's the same situation in Israel. I remember us chatting about this, and the Israelians (is this a word? Well, it is now.) were among the first to get vaccinated. Not too surprising that about 6 months later there was another surge.
Vaccinations aren't 100% effective, but we already agreed on that. Boosters would be a likely necessity, but we already knew of that. That's why the current talk is now 'BOOSTERS!'. We'll see how that pan out, I think they might help.
When i explained my concerns in the past I did go into detail on boosters. What I had said at the time is that for a vaccine to have any potential of working it would need boosters that would likely need to be very frequent, on the order of every 3 months to 6 months, which is not practical as a long term solution and overtime presents ever increasing risk since the nature of mutation of corona class viruses are not like flu viruses. A flu virus undergoes recombination and thus its next gen viruses are not any more deadly or specialized, they just make the vaccine less effective. Corona class viruses as they mutate to stay ahead of vaccines undergo a more classical form of mutation and as such create an ever increasing risk as you vaccinate against it, presuming you even find a booster every 6 months to be palatable at all.
@freemo Yeah, as this is still largely untested fields for this virus you certainly do have a point. Though there are more factors at play, of course.
I see boosters as a way to buy time at the moment until we have a more permanent solution. Even without boosters the virus would mutate anyway.
Also, boosters can still go two ways at this point. Either you would need regular boosters, or the third (or maybe fourth) booster would be the end solution. Some vaccinations for other ailments needed a 3rd booster much later as well. But seeing as we haven't got much long-term experience yet with this virus it is still largely guess-work at this time.
For boosters to buy us time at all we would need to engineer a new RNA sequence every 3 - 6 months. Usually vaccine testing takes longer than this so the only way boosters will really be effective (most likely) is if we throw the usual safety testing out the window.
That said also keep in mind that while boosters may buy us some time it means every new booster that targets the new strain will likely give rise to a newer even worse strain. So you may find going that path doesnt buy us time at all but pushes the virus evolution to the point where the problem becomes even harder to solve and in the end make matters much much worse (potentially)
While you are right the virus mutates regardless of boosters, and that the vaccine doesnt **cause** the mutation what the vaccine does do is it causes new mutations to be **selected for**. This means that without a vaccine new mutations will come, be very low prevelance (well below 0.1%) and then die off as they cant compete against the pathway of the original virus. The vaccine however gets rid of the base virus and thus allows the new strain to become selected for at which point you will see its prevalence skyrocket nearly over night from <0.1% to 99%, the exact opposite of dying off. This is exactly what happened with Delta.
The other thing about boosters is two fold 1) as with all coronaviruses immunity tends to be temporary (anywhere from weeks to a few years) so you need a booster that is the same as the original every few months 2) coronaviruses mutate fairly quickly so you also get new strains arising. Meaning you need to double-dose, one booster every few months for the old strain AND new boosters you have to start repeating for new strains.
Point is, if you go down the vaccination route it becomes unmanageable very quickly.
@freemo That's a very valid point, but no vaccination at all isn't really much of an option either if the healthcare gets overworked and other treatments (cancer, heart trouble, etc) gets cancelled just because of Covid. Unless we get to decide that everybody who's infected just stays at home, and just will die at home as well if they can't handle the virus.
We're in quite a pickle, aren't we?
Respirators work against all the variants, past, present and future.
Also, I think the mutation rate is more a function of number of times the virus replicates rather than a straight function of time, so if the numbers can be controlled with other prophilaxis, then the virus will have fewer cycles in which to have a mutation occur.
Mutation rate is a function of a few things, the number of times the virus replicates, the viral load produced when it replicates, and the accuracy of the transcription. The vaccine does **not** cause the mutation rate to increase. What vaccines cause is mutations to be **selected for**, thats where people get confused. When mutations arent selected for then they happen all the time and almost all of them will just die off as quickly as they come into existance. When they are selected for, however, then even if far fewer mutations occur the ones that do occur stand a much higher chance of proliferating once they come into existance. Thats the problem.
@Pat
There is no doubt resperators will decrease cases if used properly (they often arent but thats another matter). So it would mean less invesment in ventilators and ICU and more managable rates.
That said I dont think respirators are where we should focus anymore. Not because they fail to work but because it isnt reasonable to expect the world to wear respirators for the rest of our lives (or on and off for the res tof our lives).
If it were up to me we would ditch resperators, ditch vaccines, ditch social distancing, just go back to acting like the virus doesnt exist. Divert all of that money into expanding ICU wars and increasing our stock of ventilators. Wear a mask or respirator in nursing homes or around elderly but otherwise just let the virus run its course.
@freemo @trinsec
Yeah, Darwin for viruses.
If the overall number of cases can be kept down using other means, like respirators, testing, etc., then there are fewer absolute number of replications. I think the delta variant came from all the uncontrolled cases in India, if I remember. The more people who are infected, the more chance of a new "successful" variant.