From 'tiger to wildcat': Coronavirus could die out without vaccine
nzherald.co.nz
nzherald.co.nz
>It's not that hard to find out if there was a mutation in the virus, you sequence it and compare it.
There are lots of problems with this assumption. Sequencing is pretty quick, it's not instantaneous or free. More to the point, sequencing a single virus from a single individual who survived doesn't necessarily tell you anything about that virus. You would need to sequence many viruses from many patients, and compare patient outcomes (while controlling for other factors) with sequence data. That is neither quick nor easy.
Viruses can mutate quickly. From what I've read, SARS CoV2 doesn't appear to have a high mutation rate compared to other viruses more in the zeitgeist, but it's definitely much higher than, say, the typical mammal. That not only means that sequencing is harder, but it also means there will be multiple strains to compare. There isn't one virus: there are currently thousands (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global) of genomes publicly available, so there's a lot to look at.
Finally, the point the individual being quoted was making is that, after all that work, the best you're likely to come up with is "there are a handful of sequence changes that correlate to better outcomes." You haven't proved it ("demonstrated scientifically").
The reason you can stop reading here is that this is one person speculating, seemingly based off of anecdotal data. They have some authority and it's implied they are looking at a lot of data, but there are no hard stats or facts.
I believe that this is happening in NZ and per the article, Italy.
But in other places (USA and Brazil come to mind) it’s a whole different story. Seems dangerous to suggest it could just die out, while cases are on the rise.
It takes a lot of observing, thinking, and testing to arrive at a decent picture of what wasn't known before.
> Science is not the word of God
No, and that's a good thing. Scientific progress depends on revising knowledge as more facts accumulate and point in different directions. Until there's enough information to illuminate things well, there are a lot of questions, missteps, etc.
I would want the government, private institutions, and every individual to lean MORE on actual science than they ever have, and to understand its benefits AND limitations, because that is how the world learns and improves.
But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing. With issues like pandemics science is more nessisary because it is a specific and specialzed issue not many people understand well, yet it is directly impacting most of our lives.
But if you look at the Amish people for example, you can live your entire life knowing almost nothing about science live a have a happy, healthy and meaningful existence. Generalizing that example more we can see that successful flourishing human civilizations have existed for all of our history and all of the probably had less than a percent of the scientific knowledge we have today, yet we are suffering from mostly tge same issues: suicide, racism, sadness, disfunctional governments, power struggles, etc.
You say that science is illuminating but I fail to see where science has truly made any part of the human expience more enlightened.
> But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing.
I was illuminating the difference between the world around us being its complicated, partially unexplored self, and the GP saying that science is muddled and confusing, which it is, but to a lesser degree than the world it is developing from.
> you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way
Your use of quotes there is the tell... many have purported to "know" "scientific" facts when their beliefs were nothing but beliefs. And most/many have been cast aside as our level of knowledge has progressed. And that is the true progress of science - learning more about the world and changing from guesses about reality to knowledge about reality.
People will always have their agendas and limitations, but the process of learning and understanding always surpasses each individuals' limitations and gives us better understanding. Even if it is "one funeral at a time".
So far, the community of virologists and immunologists are warning that there will be a 2nd wave, possibly a 3rd and 4th wave as well, of this virus. The reasons are manifold and not at-all to do with governmental response.
No matter a government's response this is a novel virus, hey whaddoyaknow that's even what we're calling it, and it acts in manners that other viruses do not. Human bodies react to this virus differently than they do to other viruses.
To claim that governments are to blame is being disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at the worst.
It's basically the case of paying attention to something we can measure just because we can measure it.
Both things can be true, and general the less fatal a virus is, the more contagious it is. i.e. dead people can't infect live people. I mean, other than in 28 Days Later.
If immunity lasts no longer than a half-year, then there will be multiple new resurgences; it's a given.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-other-coronaviruses-...
EDIT: This was making the rounds a week or so ago https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/science/coronavirus-mutat...
Do you have a link for that? I remember some speculation about this, but they did't have a solid case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph#Islamic_Ex...
I guess I have a worry that this is part of some larger editorial stance that tries to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic by cherry-picking the research that gets reported.