SARS-CoV-2 Thoughts

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

SARS-CoV-2 is known to be a seasonal virus because the amount of viral transmission depends critically on the temperature . There are higher loads of viral inoculum that are transmitted greater distances when it's cold and absolute humidity is lower, and people are more likely to gather inside together for warmth. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.650493/full This is true of all strains, and we are entering autumn with a higher case count than we had last year. Also, last winter, Alpha was dominant nearly entirely alone, and it's not antigenically very distant from the original S protein. Instead, today, we now have many antigenically distant strains and variants of concern(VoCs). Check the dot plot for cross-immunoreactivity between strains in the following article. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/new-sars-cov-2-variants-have-changed-pandemic-what-will-virus-do-next Through those two factors, we should see new domestic highs in case co

SARS-CoV-2 caught most experts off guard with its evolutionary alacrity , but it always should have been expected to be very good at evolution despite a relatively low mutation rate . The progenitor virus(or, at least, the majority of its genome) came from bats. Bats have amazing immune systems due to their colony lifestyle in cramped quarters and their high metabolic rate. Further, coronaviruses have the longest genomes of any known +ssRNA viral family, and viruses are under constant evolutionary pressure to keep their genomes small. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 is about 30kb in length. The value of the genome was evidently great enough to compensate for that pressure. There is more highly conserved genetic material in coronaviruses than others, which in SARS-CoV-2's case means a lot of finely tunable accessory genes that screw up the immune system badly and even vicious microRNA's outside the coding regions of actual genes . SARS-CoV-2 has absolutely ingenious replicatio