| haxxiy said: There are thousands if not millions of times more people in direct contact with bushmeat than working at virus laboratories. People just want a strawman to beat, or perhaps things to be more exciting and cinematic than they are. |
If you reject evolution theory, it becomes a lot harder to accept how viruses naturally pop up.
According to Google, bats make up 1/5th of the mammalian population It is estimated that there are 900 to over 1,200 species of bats in the world, making up one-fifth of Earth's total mammalian population, the second largest order after rodents. Now the virus is around in over 25 million currently infected, probably a lot more undetected on top of that. Constantly replicating with minor mutations, copy errors, while duplicating. No lab can compete with that.
It's now all but certain that Sars-Cov-2 will become endemic. Moving to the younger population (already happening) while becoming more virulent and less deadly. It might eventually end up less deadly than the flu. Of course there's also still a possibility a deadlier strain pops up, however more infectious less deadly strains have the best chance at survival, and will give people some immunity against a deadlier strain emerging.
The virus will live on, while losing its bite
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741
One year after its emergence, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become so widespread that there is little hope of elimination.
The transition from epidemic to endemic dynamics is associated with a shift in the age distribution of primary infections to younger age groups, which in turn depends on how fast the virus spreads. Longer-lasting sterilizing immunity will slow the transition to endemicity. Depending on the type of immune response it engenders, a vaccine could accelerate establishment of a state of mild disease endemicity.
Our analysis of immunological and epidemiological data on endemic human coronaviruses (HCoVs) shows that infection-blocking immunity wanes rapidly but that disease-reducing immunity is long-lived.
once the endemic phase is reached and primary exposure is in childhood, SARS-CoV-2 may be no more virulent than the common cold. We predict a different outcome for an emergent coronavirus that causes severe disease in children. These results reinforce the importance of behavioral containment during pandemic vaccine rollout, while prompting us to evaluate scenarios for continuing vaccination in the endemic phase.
The question is, will adding it to the regular vaccines received in early childhood be enough to keep it under control in the future, or will it need to be added to the seasonal flu shot.
For now
With so much of COVID-19's future still an open question, the experts agree, the best approach is to focus on tamping down overall virus activity, reducing its ability to spread and mutate.
"If we don't have COVID-19 under control … more variants will only lead to more virulent variants,"
Let the labs catch up to the virus. The vaccines will speed up natural evolution of the virus attempting to evade them.
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