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Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

The h1n1 is a bit of a strange case though because it jumps species boundary very often and mutates very quickly. COVID-19 appears to evolve much, much slower. Based on my limited understanding of virology, I think this means it's unlikely to become a seasonal problem unless the general populations immune system does not retain immunity to the same strain for a significant period of time.

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We already know CoV2 rarely causes any symptoms in children. I wonder if there was a time in prehistory where common Rhinoviruses and Coronaviruses wiped out larger populations of elderly.

Even if our immune system memory doesn't last very long for these types of viruses, wouldn't young people getting exposed to it now likely reduce its impact long term?

It also seems like >95% of people who die from this are over 55 years old. When you get into your 70s~80s, aren't common colds one of the things that result in natural deaths, due to an aging immune system allowing pneumonia to set in where it wouldn't in a younger person?

> We already know CoV2 rarely causes any symptoms in children. I wonder if there was a time in prehistory where common Rhinoviruses and Coronaviruses wiped out larger populations of elderly.

Didn't pneumonia, influenza (among small pox and others) have terrible consequences on American native Indians ?

I believe small pox was the major one, I've heard among the Incas for example, it wiped out between 60 and 90 percent of the population. The main reason the colonists were able to spread so easily in the two continents is because disease wiped out huge swaths of the native population before many settlers even arrived. It's not like muskets are all that superior to bow and arrow (if at all, due to reload speed). Much of the land was just left vacant and unoccupied, and former cities abandoned.

And then came Colt's Revolver.

> A Texas Ranger, Captain Samuel Walker, wrote Colt a testimonial that read, in part:"Your pistols...[are] the most perfect weapon in the World... to keep the various warlike tribes of Indians and marauding Mexicans in subjection."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/colt_hi.htm...

The 20th century decolonization wars showed that natives can adapt to modern weaponry fairly well.

But you need the numbers to pull this off. Sioux are not numerous enough to threaten American dominance of their territory. If they were as numerous as, say, Punjabis, that would be a different story.

Punjabis acquitted themselves fairly well in 1849.

Yes that probably happened several times in human history. There are four other endemic coronaviruses. Most people catch them as children and build up some immunity, so even if they're reinfected later the symptoms are usually less severe. But they can be deadly to immunocompromised patients.

There is some strong circumstantial evidence that the 1889 "Russian flu" pandemic wasn't caused by influenza at all but rather by the emergence of HCoV-OC43. It killed about a million people worldwide.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

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