I need to stop looking at this shit, it doesn’t help :doomer:
Somewhat relatedly, what this tweet’s is suggesting is sobering. From the replies:
The image says that infection waves will come faster and faster as time proceeds, that variants will multiply faster and faster and eventually this leads to entropy (utter chaos). In your real life situation it will mean constant infection with multiple variants of SARS-COV-2.
I’m gonna have a drink, I think.
constant reinfection of a disease that depletes your t-cells and can cause organ damage and alzheimer's like symptoms. :shrek-pixel-despair:
"it's riskier to drive to work everyday." :grillman:
yeah no shit. It was obvious from the start that the immunity isn't normal
Could we please wait for even a tiny bit of scientific consensus before going full doomer.
Especially the tweet is just... Biology isn't just math. A bifurcation diagram looks scary but really tells us nothing about the real world.
At this point it seems almost the world should band together and redacted America before we continue to mutate it
spoiler
I love italicizing redacted really makes you insert your best ideas.
I wanted to shoot the first liberal I heard say it was endemic as we were weeks away from the peak of the whole pandemic (so far). You don't have to "understand the science" to get that the vaccination would not be nearly as effective as every liberal politician sold us on. They sold us that half-truth because they and their petite bourgeoisie base are begging for the world to return to normal without actually wanting to take the steps to reach that normalcy (which would probably cause far less economic damage to them in the process but capitalism). Instead they use a lazy opt-in half measure and immediately cave to the reactionaries on all issues.
Aside from it dying out on its own, the only way out of this is socialism. The masses willfully staying home in isolation for a month or two while the absolute minimal production to maintain society occurs under the auspices of the proletarian dictatorship. I can't guarantee that would even end it since there are animal reservoirs everywhere, but it would allow us to move to a model similar to the Chinese where they shut down transmission rapidly.
This is spot on.
They even sort of acknowledge this at the bottom of the article in a shitty both-sides way without directly connecting it to money:
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that there was a chance that Covid could be ended as a global health emergency this year if the right course of action — which includes addressing vaccine and health-care inequity — is taken. His comments came a week after another senior WHO official warned that “we won’t ever end the virus” and that “endemic does not mean ‘good,’ it just means ‘here forever.’”
The whole “it’s just going to get more mild and fade into the background” idea drives me nuts.
Comparing it to other diseases is kind of like comparing car accidents. As you cartwheel through the median at 200 kph “don’t worry, historically, most of these are just fender benders”
Seriously, it’s a random process and it’s not this “new coronavirus” it’s all of them out there, mutating away in a billion people a day. A virus isn’t even really alive, it’s like a glitch. Flip a couple bits here and it’s mild, flip a couple there and it’s deadly. It’s not like a virus that kills its host will necessarily burn itself out, it might burn itself in by slamming the system so hard that the west can’t even manage their existing countermeasures.
Also, just wait for the lab leak of gain-of-function flu. We’ve established that, as a species, we do not have an immune system and a large portion of the population actively resists any attempt to create one.
It’s not like a virus that kills its host will necessarily burn itself out, it might burn itself in by slamming the system so hard that the west can’t even manage their existing countermeasures.
And in something like covid where the infectious time and the “you die” time are so far apart, there’s basically no pressure for it to be less deadly. Omicron was very slightly less deadly by a fluke. There is no reason to believe that will be a trend, and the next variant could just as well be more deadly
Omicron was very slightly less deadly by a fluke
Omicron is as deadly as the alpha variant because that's what it evolved from, "less deadly" here means less deadly than the Delta variant
Right! I forgot about that. So actually we’ve only had deadliness change once and it got more deadly
We shut down for the alpha variant but are ok with the rampant spread of something as deadly but however many times more virulent (6?)
That’s the point I keep making, like my professors keep trying to get me to go to class in person and I’m like “Fuck no I still have the same risk assessment I had two years ago”
Living under capitalism makes me want to become a Serbian cave hermit each day.
Lmfao were so boned if true.
I still think it's going to become less lethal and mellow out to the same rate of infection/death as the flu, but I don't think that'll happen soon. We'll have enough covid spikes to probably get hospitals to finally collapse after workers have just finally had enough
There is no reason to believe it will become less deadly. Because the infectious period is so long before the “you die” period, there’s basically no pressure pushing it to be more or less deadly. The reason infectious diseases tend to become less deadly is because if a virus kills its host before it can spread, that virus doesn’t spread. If you kill your host slowly it doesn’t matter.
Take rabies for example. It’s been around for thousands of years, and it still kills almost 100% of people it infects.
I also think we forget in a post-vaccination world just how bad diseases used to be. Smallpox didn’t become like the flu, it killed a fuck ton of people until we figured out vaccines and decided we’d had enough of it and put in tons of effort into eradicating it.
I'd say it's inevitable that it eventually becomes like the flu based on historical accounts of other pandemics. To think otherwise would be to assume this new coronavirus has some particularly extraordinary properties when it comes to new mutations and such, and it doesn't seem like it does, at least I'm not familiar with such theories.
You're right that it could last for a while longer but I'm kinda hoping this year is the last really serious one.
The top comment is quite the fucking take...
An epidemic as in flu-like, maybe. It comes every year and then goes away again.
We've tried everything we could to beat this thing but sometimes you just fucking fail.
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT WE TRIED NOTHING AND WE HAVE AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT COULD BE DONE THAT WORKS THAT WE REFUSE TO FOLLOW :monke-rage:
Covid will always be an epidemic virus — not an endemic one scientist warns
neolibs get decent reading comprehension challenge
