Covid-19's Make Room Scenario
People seem unable to keep their hands off each other.
This is the human characteristic that the corona virus exploits to spread itself throughout the human population.
The corona virus does not appear to be deadly for most people, killing only the most vulnerable -- killing only those with certain systemic conditions, some of which are not yet known.
There, currently, is no vaccine that will prevent or cure a covid-19 infection.
This combination of low mortality and the human compulsion to socialize, along an absence of a vaccine, results in the corona virus becoming endemic in the human population.
Then, the virus mutates so that it can more efficiently exploit human resources so that it can grow more virulently so that it begins to kill more people. Perhaps the virus is a social virus, in the sense that the virus population in a person must reach a certain population at which point it reacts to its own population density and begins responding to that density in a way that kill the host, the infected person. Perhaps it adapts so that the immune system no longer perceives it as a threat, thus allowing the virus population to grow while avoiding detection.
A high mortality rate is not necessarily an evolutionary dead-end, so long as the pool of human that can be infected is sufficiently large.
If this mutation does not occur for a few years, and that the spread of this mutation is facilitated by the presence of the non-mutated strain of the virus (which by this time is endemic) then the mutated strain spreads quickly and widely.
Perhaps the virus is fatal based on the presence of certain widely distributed genetic alleles determining, say, right-handedness or heterosexuality. As a result, 90% of the population dies, the remainder being immune.
At this point, natural herd immunity has been achieved.
This is the human characteristic that the corona virus exploits to spread itself throughout the human population.
The corona virus does not appear to be deadly for most people, killing only the most vulnerable -- killing only those with certain systemic conditions, some of which are not yet known.
There, currently, is no vaccine that will prevent or cure a covid-19 infection.
This combination of low mortality and the human compulsion to socialize, along an absence of a vaccine, results in the corona virus becoming endemic in the human population.
Then, the virus mutates so that it can more efficiently exploit human resources so that it can grow more virulently so that it begins to kill more people. Perhaps the virus is a social virus, in the sense that the virus population in a person must reach a certain population at which point it reacts to its own population density and begins responding to that density in a way that kill the host, the infected person. Perhaps it adapts so that the immune system no longer perceives it as a threat, thus allowing the virus population to grow while avoiding detection.
A high mortality rate is not necessarily an evolutionary dead-end, so long as the pool of human that can be infected is sufficiently large.
If this mutation does not occur for a few years, and that the spread of this mutation is facilitated by the presence of the non-mutated strain of the virus (which by this time is endemic) then the mutated strain spreads quickly and widely.
Perhaps the virus is fatal based on the presence of certain widely distributed genetic alleles determining, say, right-handedness or heterosexuality. As a result, 90% of the population dies, the remainder being immune.
At this point, natural herd immunity has been achieved.
posted by Godel at 9:34 AM
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