How Lefties View Science
(media.communities.win)
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Everything they've described about this new wave, (more widespread, weaker) is exactly how virus propogation works. It either gets weaker but more virulent to ensure survival or it gets hardier and deadlier but has trouble spreading.
This is nothing new. If anything it's good. Almost like it's from the same family as a common cold....
Does it happen that it gets deadlier for the individual? Some people argued that doesn't really happen.
The only way it's going to be deadlier for individuals is if they have some other comorbidity that contributes to a worsening of their situation. Old age, obesity, weakened immune system, etc, can all make an infection with a lesser variant of a virus more problematic. But the media aren't going to tell you if the person that dies from it weighs in at 450 and has asthma and diabeetus, they'll just report it as a COVID death and pump their statistics.
So it doesn't become deadlier, really, if I understand you correctly.
Correct. As the life cycle of a virus progress typically each generation of it gets weaker in its effects on the host, but as such it becomes easier for it to spread around because people can be carrying it for longer periods of time without realizing it. The comorbidities are usually the deciding factor at that point - it's like how a person with AIDS usually doesn't die from AIDS itself, they die from stuff like pneumonia or cancers that the body would normally be able to fight off if their immune system wasn't weakened. In the case of COVID, if the person didn't already have trouble breathing (asthma) and they didn't already have a weakened immune system (unhealthy lifestyle or old age), then they're likely going to survive any case of it they come down with.
Thanks, but by "usually" you mean it can regularly also mutate to become more deadly? Or that it stays the same, at least from this aspect?
The survival-optimized form of a virus is just dangerous enough to make you contagious, without making you ill enough to avoid spreading it (which would include anything even remotely lethal).