And the chance of getting https://wikipedia.com/Long_COVID barely drops which each subsequent infection, so looks like we’ll all be chronically ill in a couple decades, yay!
Might be endemic, still causes an average loss of 1 IQ point every time someone catches it. And most unvaccinated people catch it several times a year because you don’t really become immune anymore.
3-6 points on first infection. 2 points after an additional infection. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain-significant-drops-in-iq-scores-are/
An engineered virus that drops your IQ and gives you extreme fatigue, infecting the whole world right before the fascists try to take over all across the globe. Probably just a coincidence.
It’s a good adaptation of the virus though. Making the host stupider makes it easier to reinfect them. Could just be natural selection.
Yes well, we all knew this was coming right?
Logically a virus or any type of parasite is better served by higher transmission and lower lethality to the host, leaving more places to replicate to. That seemed to be the trend back when there was routine reporting on the latest evolutions of it, so this makes sense.
Which is why the plague never took off… wait.
This is nonsense.
In a longer term sense. If all the viable hosts die day one the virus stops having anyplace to go.
The plague also largely died out after killing a massive portion of the population, if they hadn’t been killed it could have gone on for far longer.
Killing the host isn’t beneficial for the parasite using it for resources. Not that there’s an active effort to be choose the traits, but something that happens to evolve to be less lethal and more easily transmitted will tend to exist longer.
The plague was one of the most fatal pandemics ever. “It’s alright, if it’s too deadly it can’t spread much” is nonsense. THAT’S what people are saying.
At what point did I say anything about it being too deadly that it can’t spread? It’s entirely feasible that something could be very deadly and very contagious at the same time.
However, with that combination unless the host reproduces at a crazy high rate the virus won’t last long because it’ll run out of hosts to infect quickly.
In epidemiology, an infection is said to be endemic in a specific population or populated place when that infection is constantly present, or maintained at a baseline level.
For an infection to persist for a long time it needs to have somewhere to live, if everyone dies it can’t become an endemic condition.
