155
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
155 points (97.0% liked)
News
23422 readers
2636 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
it's the new flu. the old flu is still a thing, of course. covid is here to stay & it'll be a yearly thing for a long time to come.
I agree. It killed most of those who were most susceptible already. We'll adapt, as a species, to it over time.
I'm not sure we will adapt. Killing off the elderly and infirm isn't exactly applying a lot of evolutionary pressure.
When you get resistant for it as young and healthy, it won't be as dangerous when you get it again as older. It is good for the virus to spread as much as possible and not be leathal.
Immunity doesn't last though. If it was like chicken pox I think this argument would have merit, but it's more like the flu.
To drive home your point even more, unfortunately chicken pox immunity doesn't really last forever. It's a herpes virus, a DNA virus, that integrates into cell genomes. It especially likes neurons, cells which you keep your whole life. Since it's there for the rest of your life, it reactivates at inconvenient times. Shingles is probably the most benign form of reactivation, but it can cause meningitis, encephalitis, vasculitis too, among other things, all of which is very bad news for your brain. So for all the people out there with children, get that chicken pox vaccine. You don't want that potential ticking time bomb living in your kid when there's a way to prevent it.
And for all the older people out there, get that shingles vaccine when you can. It's not perfect but it'll help "remind" the immune system to keep varicella virus in you surpressed.
Resistance is different than immunity, you will get sick, but it won't be as leathal. It is exactly like flu. Flu has been here for centuries, and when Europeans brought it to America, it was huge issue for native American without resistance.
We have boosters because the resistance doesn't stay or can't keep up with the mutations.
Flu is a dangerous virus, I wouldn't say we've "adapted to it." Viruses evolve much quicker than humans. They go through countless generations in the time we have one. Flu in addition has an interesting genetic mechanism for change most other viruses don't have, where it can exchange entire large sections of its genome at once with other distinct flu viruses, very quickly creating an entirely new strain. This is one of the reasons we're constantly updating the vaccine.
I'm the US, it hospitalizes half a million or so a year and kills between 10,000-50,000 a year, comparable to all people who die from gun violence in a year in the US including suicide. We're always only one unlucky recombination event away from another 1918 flu pandemic, and the more infected people and the more it spreads the more chances for that to happen.
Sorry, I don't know if this was your intention, I just have a pet peeve for flu getting written off as no big deal. It's a huge deal and we should be continuing to work on vaccine and treatment improvements. Oddly our anti viral treatments for covid are probably more effective than anti viral flu treatments at this pont, if people actually take them.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
I also cannot believe that after this recent experience governments around the world aren't pouring even more investment into pandemic monitoring and response. I mean I can, we're notoriously short sighted, but seems governments and people in general are all pretending the pandemic never happened and can never happen again.
old flu was just the "Spanish"(American?) Flu right?