SARS-CoV-2 Thoughts

Disclaimer : This is an opinion and a prediction that includes as many sources and the best logic possible. Do not base your personal health decisions on it. Plain Language Introduction SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus with its closest relatives in bats, emerging in the human population at some point in late 2019. As a newly introduced pathogen, there was only one variant at first. Now we have thousands of strains that have been identified, with countless individual virus particles with countless mutations. The genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 is much greater than scientists thought it would be by this point in time. Recombination and Evolution That's because we failed to notice that SARS-CoV-2 relies heavily on recombination for evolution. With recombination, in a host that is infected with two strains of the virus, the virus can effectively create a child from two parent virions(a virion is a single virus) through a process called strand switching. When creating a new vi...

There are five fascinating things about our choice to use booster shots. I will try to explain each, but unfortunately, some introduction is necessary first. COVID Vaccines: How Good are They Really? Global governments have bet the farm on vaccination eradicating (remember when we used to talk about "herd immunity"?) or greatly prolonging the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 as a widespread pathogen to such a great extent that they're deploying vaccine passports for routine, daily activities , demonstrably not a great idea almost regardless what you want to achieve. It was immediately apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was very contagious. Later studies found it to have had a base initial R0 of around 5.7, compared to around 1.3 for the average influenza strain. That meant that achieving an effective vaccine was always going to be extremely hard: a 40% effective flu vaccine could bring Reff close to or below 1, but a 40% effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would come nowhere close. The ...

As SAGE implied in their 20th Technical Update's note 1.8.1 , we have effectively multiple serotypes of SARS-CoV-2 already, as Delta antisera doesn't neutralize B.1.351 nor B.1.621 virus meaningfully. That makes South Africa a potentially interesting case, because B.1.351 and C.1.2 emerged there. B.1.621 emerged in Colombia and has accounted for a significant percentage of cases, but Delta caused a serious wave in only South Africa. Beta was never recorded in Colombia and Delta barely touched them, and interestingly, they are now far below their record high infections, indicating that B.1.621 antisera is effective against its respective virus. https://origin-coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/colombia The lack of Delta's emergence could be geographic and political, but it may also mean that B.1.621 antisera is effective against Delta, which would be very encouraging news. https://outbreak.info/situation-reports?pango=B.1.621&selected=COL&loc=IND&loc=ZAF...