The study was released because it showed that the dominance of the more more transmissible version is growing. I could be wrong on the numbers but early on, it showed 71%(I think) of the mapped genomes had the mutation and now it is 99%. Its really not a study that has any use for the lay public.
As far as it mutating more being more widespread, that is a legit concern, but most mutations either render the virus incompetent of reproducing or have no actual affect on its performance. I know movies like to make the virus mutation causing it to be much more deadly but in reality that almost never happens. Over time the mutations that survive and become common in the species are the ones that help it survive and reproduce. Killing hosts does the opposite.
Lets look at it as a an end game situation.
1. Covid mutates and gets more transmissible and deadlier. That wipes out half human population in a matter of a year. The virus then has only immune people to infect and it dies out almost instantly with nowhere to go.
2. Covid becomes more transmissible but becomes less deadly and only kills those previously weakened. 99% of the population survives and it now has billions of people left to infect with new people born every day to be hosts. It lives forever(or close to it). This is what happened with the Spanish Flu. Seemingly minor mutations(it mutates quicker than covid btw) coupled with a growing medical knowledge of it caused it to become less deadly and more transmissible and 100 years later it is still going strong and killing only those very weak to begin with. The quick mutation is also why there is a yearly minor change in the vaccine and we have to get a new one every fall but its only 25-50% effective in adults.
@mas1581 I did a quick scan and saw that people will eventually be immune to it with some side effects, i.e. becomes less virulent similar to the Spanish Flu. Eventually, it will no longer be deadly.
When I try to see when COVID is no longer a concern in the US, I see a calender with a 95% probability by mid-March of next year.
A recent ( September ) choir practice in Spain appears to have infected 30 of 41 members with Covid. They rehearsed indoors, windows closed with air-conditioning on.
https://news.yahoo.com/choir-practice-spain-infects-30-111822296.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=fb
@lovendures. I just read that story. What is so ironic about it is that they were rehearsing for an outdoor event. Why did they feel they had to rehearse indoors which is so unsafe? What are people thinking?
God help Florida. They are going to open bars and restaurants at full capacity.
Exactly what I thought Jeanne. We have known for MONTHS that this leads toa HUGE spread of the virus.
@jessi1978. I would call that a GOP election decision. They don't care what happens after November 3rd. They figure the numbers won't start skyrocketing and the hospitals filling to capacity until after the election.
Glad you're seeing next spring and its not a complete surprise to me. Covid is strange in how it affects people and much different than most other viruses. We have the numbers of confirmed cases, which covers about 3% of the US population-far from herd immunity with almost no chance of getting there naturally. That said, if you add asymptoxalic cases that have test at 10 to as high as 25x the confirmed numbers in small samples, we really have no clue how widespread it is, nor will we ever.
(Only speculation of a possibility with no actual proven facts to back it up other than deductive reasoning of one slimly possible explanation)What we are seeing is covid could be exposing 50-75% of the population by now and the only people testing positive or getting sick are those that can be infected. With such a transmissible disease and so many stupid people exposing themselves to superspreader events but not getting sick or even infected, it could be that a majority of the population is already immune. Coupled with finding shed viruses in sewage almost a year before it started with no uptick in related diagnoses(pneimonia/stroke/etc) during that time, it does allow for this possibility to be plausible.
If it is to be pretty much gone before the schoolyard is out, either a vaccine must be a lot more effective than any virology is expecting, or the population has to be already vastly immune. I hope you are right and we can move past this quickly-for all of our safety and sanity.
...finding shed viruses in sewage almost a year before it started...
This is very interesting to me. Not that they found shed viruses, but that they found them almost a year before this mess started. I may have mentioned this before, but I had some kind of respiratory disease that - now that I think about it - matched many of the Covid-19 symptoms, but I had it in January-February of 2019. Several of my colleagues at work had the same thing in the same time period, and it took nearly six weeks for the lung issues to go away after "recovering". It was just written off as some unknown flu at the time.