CoVid19 Part XIV - 8,089 in ROI (288 deaths) 1,589 in NI (92 deaths) (10/04) Read OP

kippy wrote: »

I don't disagree, am only trying to point out that we are not near peak/plateau in deaths per day and people really need to maintain a level of cop on with regards to their behaviour.

I disagree, I believe we are in and around peak infections. Deaths cannot be used as a guideline due to the terrible nursing home issue. I agree with the latter part of your post; let's keep it going and gradually reduce restrictions as indicated.

dalyboy wrote: »

Old age and seasonal pneumonia ,,, maybe !

Yes but how is the virus being spread into nursing homes...

dalyboy wrote: »

Old age and seasonal pneumonia ,,, maybe !

We likely won't know for a while but, they should be excepting the nursing home statistics when evaluating the effects of restrictions on the general population. There is no point keeping everyone at home when most deaths are occurring in a controllable environment such as a nursing home.

mandrake04 wrote: »

Thats true, there believed to be several strains there were a small proportion of original Wuhan Chinese cases that passed with out much problem, the European strain that was behind the cruise ship cases was far more aggressive. I think Australia fairly lucky 2/3 of the cases were from overseas, and were picked up quickly by quick turnaround in testing. Then enforced army guarded isolation in hotels. The was one cluster at an aged care home early on, couple of deaths but lucky it could been worse.

I've been tracking the scientific discussion of this the last while and SARS-CoV-2 has probably spun up 4 or 5 strains so far, although they're not all that different.

There are roughly 10 high frequency mutations going on and in one strain it's definitely become more effective at interacting with the ACE2 receptors, which is how it gets into your lungs.

It's all a bit pot luck - RNA viruses aren't great at copying code, which is how they mutate and evolve - basically they've no spellcheckers so code gets random errors far more than in our cells.

So, it's possible it could become more virulent, or it could actually go the other way too and become less of a problematic infection.

It's likely though that viruses with mutations that lead to the best transmissibility are the ones that are being caught and copied most.

If you think about it, that could mean that a more transmissible, but possibly less deadly version becomes the established strain over time. This is because the strains that produce moderate symptoms don't take people out of circulation, so they spread more rapidly and effectively. If you've dramatic symptoms, you'll typically end up in self-isolation or hospital, so the spread is dramatically reduced.

It's all just speculation though. We won't really know much until there have been studies over a few years and it's likely that multiple and probably very deadly strains will be knocking around until we get a working vaccine.

However, it does show the importance of self-isolating and quarantining when someone does get dramatic symptoms, as those are the characteristics of potential strains you definitely do not want to see proliferating across the human population.

If we end up with a COVID-19 variant that causes few or no symptoms in general, it will just end up as an endemic annoyance over time. Nobody really knows if that's very probable or how long it might take if it is.

But just remember if you do have symptoms, by containing the virus and avoiding spread until you're non-contagious, you're not only preventing spread, but also possibly impacting its evolution, albeit in a small way.