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haxxiy on 04 August 2021
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JRPGfan said:
haxxiy said:

Delta version even though its more contagious, actually has higher risk of serious illness, than the previous versions.

The idea that, it will just mutate, and eventually become harmless common cold/flu, isnt what has happend so far.
Its now both more contagious, and people that get it, get more sick.

"We will all "get" this thing multiple times in our lives, like we come across the other four endemic seasonal coronaviruses."

Hope it doesnt play out that way.
Too many people already effected, will feel the effects of lasting damage done by this virus (some of it permanent).
If this continues onwards, for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be very few "healthy" humans left, and lots of people with various forms of damaged health.

Let me clarify: pandemic viruses have no reason to get "less harmful" since they are, by default, extremely effective at infecting people and having them spread the disease. What usually happens is that people develop protective immunity to it in time. So even as sterilizing immunity wanes due to antibody half-life and antigenic drift, almost everyone will be eventually protected against severe disease and death.

I'd hope a single exposure/vaccine would suffice to get there; the very elderly, HIV+, immunosuppressed, etc. often have few naïve B and T cells left so it might not be that simple. But for most of us that will likely be the case.

Important to note, too, that lasting damage is not novel and exclusive to SARS-CoV-2. Some of the past pandemics have shown the same pattern, such as the one that was likely caused by HCoV-OC43:

The long recovery period mentioned in the German survey and British publications and the frequent neurological sequels mentioned in many British case reports from the 1889 pandemic and the following years of fatigue, lack of concentration, depression and anxiety also resemble what is now described as long haulers or long covid symptoms (Honigsbaum and Krishnan, 2020).

According to medical journals back them:

"The long enduring evil effects of an access of Influenza in a large proportion of cases suggests that the materies morbi is only slowly extinguished in or eliminated from the system. Some subjects experience a weekly attack or relapse for many weeks after the primary access. It may take the form of great impairment of mental and physical power, or the more definite shape of vertigo or cardiac depression with general arterial relaxation necessitating recourse to the recumbent position.… Relapses …are of frequent occurrence; they occurred in 9% of the cases." Source.

Nowadays, coronavirus OC43 is thought guilty of the occasional neurological disease, and coronavirus NL63 is suspected of causing Kawasaki's, so it's not like sequelae disappear 100% after the virus becomes endemic, but it is what it is.