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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

If this is asymptomatic do they eventually get sick or do they just harbor the virus?

I don't understand how the virus can be asymptomatic? How does it reproduce and what triggers it to become symptomatic?

I think of asymptomatic infectivity as a sitting war between the virus and the host immune system. The virus has taken hold in a region where it a) does not grow at a rate harmful to the host and b) already has access to a spreading mechanism, while the immune system succeeds in keeping the infection away from organs where (either) c) the virus would grow at an unsustainable rate, eventually taking down it's host and/or d) the immune system's counter reaction would be so severe that it would endanger the host. Avoiding c) and d) are in the best interest of both virus and immune system (even though both are obviously not aware of any of that), so both are effectively happy. Sooner or later the immune system will develop a countermeasure nonetheless, but until then the virus will have spread to other hosts generously. Reliably reaching a state like that would be the second best evolutionary outcome of a virus, only topped by permanently resisting the immune system's removal attempts.

A virus doesn’t “want” to kill its host; just use the minimum change to propagate (e.g. induce a cough). In face some symptoms are your own body trying to dislodge it, such as fever, and the cough itself for that matter.

Some viruses of course have gone so far as to become part of our genome. Is that asymptomatic?

As other people said, most viral diseases have a asymptomatic period. What's unique about Coronavirus is that the patient can be infectious during the asymptomatic period. This makes coronavirus so hard to be controlled.

My understanding is that most viruses have some short period of infectiousness before symptoms develop, like the flu https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/spread.htm https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/infections/how-lo...

Coronavirus however has a really long infectious period before symptoms can appear. Which I guess is to its evolutionary advantage and thus unlikely to disappear (just guessing on this part)

The virus can of course be asymptomatic, in fact it is asymptomatic in anyone when they first contract it. Then it’s up to their immune system to either fight it off or crumble. Whether symptoms show is just a matter of the severeness.

Symptoms like coughing and sneezing that discharge large droplets from the respiratory tract are a lot more effective at spreading the virus onto other hosts, but it appears that this virus is contagious enough that even asymptomatic hosts could spread it.

Being infected just means your cells have been infected and are starting to produce more viruses. That process is heavily dependent on viral load and the host's immune system. You're only symptomatic when your body begins a whole scale fight against the virus, before that, your body is still producing the virus (and you can spread it), but the virus isn't impacting you enough to be symptomatic.

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