But also, on the other side of the fraction, the rate reflects how much testing is happening. Looking to the past, however, may offer some clues. The viewpoint is the author’s own. Because we’re also learning that a lot more people have been infected than the official tallies show. Are most GMO safety studies funded by industry? Yes, the use of biotechnology, GMOs or gene editing to develop antigens for treatments including vaccines are part of the solution. ... How deadly is Covid 19? Is the novel coronavirus likely to decline in virulence as it cycles from person to person across the world? Like us on Facebook to see similar stories, L.A. County, once California's pandemic epicenter, could enter the final reopening phase May 5, Why America’s Next Covid Push Should Be Outside America. The reason: If victims are quickly immobilized (think of Ebola, for example), then they can’t readily spread the infection. Yet even then, experts believe, some version of the virus will continue to circulate, perhaps as a common cold virus or an occasional deadly outbreak among the unvaccinated, for many years, if not forever. While the paper notes in its limitations that “infectiousness and transmissibility are not always synonymous,” Korber says the findings are consistent with higher transmissibility. Still, right now, it’s hard to tease apart this kind of viral evolution from improvements in testing, treatment, and social distancing. Health officials in New York have taken small blood samples of people at grocery stores to check for Covid antibodies. With new variants of COVID like the U.K. and South African strain -- is there any evidence that COVID is adapting to become a more or less dangerous strain? That is, out of 100 people who catch any variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, one to two people are likely to die. If a country is aware of more non-fatal cases, their case fatality rate is lower. Korber and her team suggested that, on the basis of their research — conducted in cells in culture — the new strain seemed to be more infectious than the original. The version of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is less deadly but much easier to transmit from person to person. This is just total B S— a product of political efforts to detract from the seriousness … Neither Grubaugh nor his colleague Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University who has also expressed skepticism regarding the mutation’s impact on transmissibility, responded to requests for comment. According to Ewald’s analysis, high transmissibility is often associated with lower virulence. Some pandemics have lasted longer, like the Black Death, which swept out of Central Asia in 1346, spread across Europe, and ultimately may have killed as many as a third of the inhabitants of Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The differences come down to small biological factors: how long the virus stays in the air, how long it can survive on surfaces, how easily it gets to the lower lungs and how resistant it is to changes in weather or climate. Using gene editing to control forest fires? You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. The idea that circulating pathogens gradually become less deadly over time is very old. There is no necessary relationship between transmissibility and severity. But the virus itself may be less deadly. Yersinia pestis, the germ that causes plague, tamps down the early immune response, so that infected people can travel and spread infection for days before they feel sick. It seems to have originated in the writings of a 19th-century physician, Theobald Smith, who first suggested that there is a “delicate equilibrium” between parasite and host, and argued that, over time, the deadliness of a pathogen should decline since it is really not in the interest of a germ to kill its host. “But I haven’t seen any conclusive data to support that hypothesis yet.”. It’s not that bad. But Ewald’s theory also proposes that germs all have their own strategies to spread, and some of those strategies allow the germ to maintain high virulence and transmissibility. Do you know where biotech crops are grown in the world? But can it really help battle climate change? However, experts interviewed by ABC News … So what do these evolutionary theories suggest about SARS-CoV-2 and its likely trajectory? Shortly after the Cell paper was published, Yale epidemiologist and virologist Nathan Grubaugh told National Geographic, “There is a huge gap between infectiousness in a lab and human transmission.”. Such an outcome would mark the end of this current pandemic. Podcast: Should farmers embrace ‘natural’ organic chemicals to replace ‘synthetic’ inputs? But here is some good news: COVID-19 is less deadly than it was a year ago. “SARS-CoV-2 may become less deadly, not because the virus changes, but because very few people will have no immunity,” he said. That pandemic, too, came to an end, roughly seven years after it started, probably because so many had perished or developed immunity. 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