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What is a realistic mutation of the coronavirus?

Anonymous Wed 25 Mar 23:44:54 2020 No.11501802 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>11501884 >>11501927 >>11501948

Is there any way to know if corona is prone to mutation? if yes, is it possible to know what mutation is more likely?
A chilean health official say it could mutate into something harmless and go away. Any chacne of that?

Any chance of it becoming something much more dangerous, say something with the same ratio of spread but much higher lethality?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:11:25 No.11501884 Report

Quoted By: >>11501898 >>11501927

>>11501802
viruses are extremely prone to mutation, because they constantly replicate

the virus could mutate into a strain in which a key virulence gene is disrupted, making the virus less transmissible or deadly

the virus could also mutate into a strain which gains a function in some virulence or lethality gene, making it more deadly

it is impossible to predict which mutations will occur in the future

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:17:15 No.11501898 Report

Quoted By: >>11501915 >>11501919

>>11501884
but if a virus thats less contagious emerges wouldnt that make the virus just fade quickly and be overcome by the regular virus?

and if a virus thats more deadly and transmisible wouldnt it outcompete the regular strain?

in other words doesnt it have a strong evolutionary pressure to become more deadly?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:22:30 No.11501915 Report

Quoted By: >>11501918

>>11501898
no, there is no evolutionary pressure for the virus to become more deadly; a dead human can produce no more virus cells

there is pressure for the virus to become more infectious; more infected humans produce more virus cells

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:25:06 No.11501918 Report

Quoted By: >>11501934 >>11502400

>>11501915
so our worse nightmare would be a virus that is extremely infectious and extremely deadly but goes completely assymptomatic for a few weeks, right?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:25:09 No.11501919 Report

Quoted By: >>11502197

>>11501898
More transmissible and less deadly actually. That is what is favored evolutionarily.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:29:24 No.11501927 Report

Quoted By: >>11502281

>>11501802
Backing what >>11501884 said, viruses are way more prone to mutations than alive organisms because they lack enzymes that correct a wrong copy of genetic material
Most of the times mutations are disfunctional so it's more likely to mutate into less lethal forms than more deadly forms. However, given the gargantuan ammount of people infected, the odds of getting a worse form of it by pure chance is high (think about it like this, if a person generates 1000 copies of a virus in their organism and the chance of getting a more deadly mutation is of 1 in a million it's relatively unlikely, but as the amount of people infected increases you get an exponentially growing total number of copies of the original virus going around, with a correlated exponentially growing chance of getting a more dangerous version)
It's already pretty bad that there are thousands (if not millions already) of asymptomatic undiagnosed cases (which is very convenient for the virus to spread because nobody will instinctively avoid contact with an apparently healthy person)

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:30:57 No.11501934 Report

Quoted By:

>>11501918
yes, dont forget one that targets the immune system and can pass the blood brain barrier!! oh and it makes you vomit, shit, piss, ejaculate, and sneeze 24/7, and its airborne, waterborne, and carried by every animal reservoir

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 00:35:44 No.11501948 Report

Quoted By:

>>11501802
The coronavirus family is very prone to mutation, as it's extremely communicable among humans, the most numerous and widespread mammal on the planet, and as every variant is already deadly to at least a small portion of the population, just as likely to become more deadly as less.

We get a mutation like this every decade or so - SARS, MERS - this new Covid-19 is just par for the course for this family of virus. There's several less deadly variants that we tend to refer to as "colds".

I suppose the less deadly ones do have an artificial selection bias, as we don't try to eradicate them via quarantine or whatnot, but they are so prevalent, and mutation is as mutation does, so any one of them could go rogue and do a lot of damage at any time.

Even the rhinovirus, which we pretty much entirely ignore and is the most prolific human carried virus on the planet, tends to cause pneumonia in the elderly, and could easily, similarly, go widely lethal, whenever.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 02:15:18 No.11502197 Report

Quoted By:

>>11501919
>less deadly is favored evolutionarily

This theory holds no ground in a globalized society where there's plenty of host abundance. For the virus to lose a trait, it has to prevent its circulation in the environment.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 02:45:57 No.11502262 Report

Quoted By:

I want it to mutate into something that kills only my enemies

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 02:54:02 No.11502281 Report

Quoted By:

>>11501927
Coronavirus has a gene proofreader, it actually mutates relatively less quickly than other viruses.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 03:53:09 No.11502400 Report

Quoted By: >>11502417 >>11502426

>>11501918
Basically. Or something that takes a long time to kill but is basically guaranteed to and has no symptoms for the first few months.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 04:00:53 No.11502417 Report

Quoted By: >>11502426 >>11502744 >>11502751

>>11502400
To add to that, an effective bio weapon obviously wouldn’t do this. Probably the best strategy would be to have a virus that is basically harmless and unnoticed unless the host encounters some chemical substance/protein/RNA fragment/another virus which triggers some feedback mechanism to cause the original virus to kill its host. You’re talking about biomolecular and genetic engineering on a whole other level, but I wouldn’t be surprised if shit like this became a possibility in the next 50-100 years with advances in computer science, computing power, molecular biology, etc

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 04:08:47 No.11502426 Report

Quoted By:

>>11502400
5 days on average. 30 day outliers are not unheard of in this family of virus but months is straight out. Isn't like HIV which will generally leave you asymptomatically contagious for a few years (with outliers in decades).

>>11502417
...and China has biotech on par with the US (with less humanitarian regulation). If they wanted to, they could make a virus that didn't affect ethnic Chinese and remained asymptomatic for years.

Sadly, I suspect if this was bioengineered, we wouldn't be here to post about it.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 07:32:05 No.11502744 Report

Quoted By:

>>11502417
a good bioweapon has to be controllable, ideally it would be unnoticeably for the first one or two weeks then suddenly kill you dead , anything less than this is unnaceptable, it has to somehow allow for hte invading forces to come in.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 07:41:04 No.11502751 Report

Quoted By: >>11503629

>>11502417
It seems to be an effective bioweapon it is causing global hysteria. Prime time to strip away individual rights and power. Without killing a large section of the populace that can still work and earn you money.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 26 Mar 2020 15:49:14 No.11503629 Report

Quoted By:

>>11502751
China doesn't have anymore individual rights and power to strip, and it's entirely dependant on foreign investment and trade, so global hysteria is nothing but bad for it.

The US is looking at an economic disaster so terrible it topples it from the world stage, and if it loses its WRC in the process, there won't be anything left worth having power over, as its carcass gets picked to death by foreign vultures.

I suppose Russia could benefit, in the long term, but even their plan requires global warming continues to give them more resources and arctic trade routes to trade, and if no one's buying...

It's basically bad for everyone in power - if someone designed the thing, they'd at least have rigged it not to affect the majority of their nation's populous.

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