The virus that causes the common cold can effectively boot the Covid virus out (opens in new tab)

Viruses are specialized. They won't attack aliens. Bacteria might. It's the fungi in many respects that are the masters of this planet. If we manage to destroy ourselves so badly that we take out most multicellular organisms as well, it'll be the fungi that rebuild the ecology.

It'll probably be the fungi that the aliens have to worry about too.

The writing is nice but flawed. Since War of the Worlds, we have advanced tremendously and no longer need intelligent design or creation myths to explain microorganisms.

Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance. Small mutations over millions of years led to the tiniest organisms, not "creatures", and most microorganisms don't even interact with higher life forms. It's only after epochs of time that complex mammals arose, breathing air, and these mammalian hosts then did provide the harbor for pathogens we know today.

There are colds caused by influenza viruses, but because "the common cold is defined on the basis of its clinical presentation, a mild influenza infection can accurately be diagnosed as a cold, meaning that the two infections are not completely distinct disease entities."[0] Once someone with a cold tests positive for the flu, though, we would generally correct the description to a mild case of the flu and no longer say they have a cold.

[0] https://www.hmsreview.org/issue/2015/1/the-most-common-illne...

Is it possible that all coronaviruses, including the ones that cause a common cold, have a similar morbidity profile to COVID? Very minor infection in the young or those with previous exposure, extremely deadly in the old and naive. Except we all catch a bunch of colds in childhood, so nobody has to worry about a cold wiping out nursing homes.

What constitutes a "cold"? Is there some kind of definition for it?

Also post-industrial Europe and especially London had awful, awful air quality. I'll bet if you look at the 'seasons' for going to Bath, for instance, that they overlapped with the worst weather for creating smog in London.

On the research presented in the original article, what predicted implications would this research have had for March 2020? I thought 2020 seemed like a fairly average year for colds up until March, when COVID spiked. Is that suggesting this benefit/effect weaker in a population than the test measures in a individual, or just that March could have been much worse across the world? (for example, was hypothetically Italy having a very low rate of colds at the time?)

Influenza isn’t infective enough to spread during the summer months anyway (i.e. it is completely suppressed), unlike rhinoviruses, so it’s easily most plausible that a few additional hygiene measures have suppressed influenza further.

My limited understanding of that narrative is that COVID19/SARS-CoV-2 needs larger droplets to spread, and thus common masks help. But other viruses may be able to spread further as aerosols and last longer on surfaces, thus common/non-fine-particulate-filtering masks may not help.

This is actually a big problem for mRNA vaccines, which are also foreign RNAs, and to overcome it for example Pfizer/Moderna use unnatural RNA bases, among other things, to bypass these detection mechanisms.

It's not exactly clear how cells can distinguish self/non-self RNA, some markers are known, like different RNA cappings, different letter frequencies, some chemical modifications.

>Dr Murcia said: "Vaccination, plus hygiene measures, plus the interactions between viruses could lower the incidence of Sars-CoV-2 heavily, but the maximum effect will come from vaccination."

Vaccines are an end product of nature and evolution, too, and are much more reliable than hoping you always happen to get infected with rhinovirus near the same time you're exposed to SARS-CoV-2.