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.
Note: I'm not saying viruses don't have conditions they need met, they do, obviously. I'm saying they can attack an alien just as likely as they can a human.
And in fact they bump into some sort of algae that lives in the atmosphere that really likes the saline mixture that makes up most of the liquid in our bodies.
Any one taking care of a cat knows this well.
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.
Give the dude a break on the athiest rant, he's been dead half a century.
Hang on. Are you implying that science created artifical life from just elements? Because that would be news to me.
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.
We clearly don’t have the faintest understanding of the long-term dynamics of something like SARS, when all the conventional model parameters go to such extremes. And when the disease is evolving. And when people retreat inside and stop getting sun. And so on.
What constitutes a "cold"? Is there some kind of definition for it?
So I think you have an implied question as to whether there is some more specific meaning, the answer to that is no.
> The common cold, also known simply as a cold, is a viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract that primarily affects the respiratory mucosa of the nose, throat, sinuses, and larynx.
further down,
> Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses being the most common.[13]
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.
If it's true that rhinovirus is such a potent inhibitor of SARS-CoV2, at the very least, the interplay between SARS-CoV2 and other respiratory viruses is non-trivial, and doesn't explain the complete suppression of influenza. Any simple hypothesis involving "competitive inhibition" is likely to be wrong.
The fact that rhinovirus continues to circulate so widely should also make people at least question the dominant narrative concerning masks and respiratory viruses. But I digress...
[1] https://syndromictrends.com/metric/panel/rp/percent_positivi...
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?)
That's exactly correct, and instead the poster is continuously misinterpreting a rate as a fixed quantity.
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.
If you're saying that rhinoviruses are more contagious than the flu because they're less seasonal...there's really no evidence to support that. They're more-or-less the same [1]. It's possible that influenza is more sensitive to heat, light, etc.
My point is, the story isn't likely to be simple or reductionist.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020404v...
Flu has been eradicated by lockdown, but lockdown must continue because COVID has not. That appears to be the policy right now.
That said, if you're going to claim that all of these things we have done have eliminated the flu, you should take at least a few moments to reflect on the fact that they have done ~nothing to rhinovirus.
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.
Further experiments showed rhinovirus was triggering an immune response inside the infected cells, which blocked the ability of Sars-CoV-2 to make copies of itself.
What? What defenses do cells have after already being infected with viral RNA?
"We could see surges in flu. We could see surges in other respiratory viruses and other respiratory pathogens," she said,
Why? Why does covid mean we're going to see unusual winter surges in non-covid diseases?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria#Malariother...
It's well known that a primed immune system (in non-immunocompromised individuals) will combat viral infections more readily. The innate immune system (as opposed to the adaptive genetically diverse B/T-Cell antibody system) is a Thing and this is why people were discussing giving standard vaccines (including Flu, BCG, and others) before there were COVID specific vaccines. Saying that the "common cold" (which isn't a single virus, but a set of conditions), can "boot out" COV2 is silly gibberish and completely unsupported by evidence. Furthermore infecting people with unknown "colds" could in fact infecting them with (or covering up) "pre-symptomatic" COVID.
Sorry, but you need to bring the actual Bigfoot/Nessi in for people to believe outrageous claims at this point. Wearing "protective amulets" against them is more likely to cause problems that promote solutions.
and my fifi's got massively offended by the usage of the word "trump". my inner ninja karen is about to pull the facemask and do a reeeeeeeeeee mortal kombat finish move
Do yourself and your lineage a favor and research Dr Hamer's Five Biological Laws.
Saying virus particles are the cause of illnesss is like saying ashes are the cause of fire. Both are at the scene of the crime, and neither are at fault.
There is quite a bit of pseudoscience on the internet that people don't really need glasses, they can train their eyes to work without them. See, for instance, the so-called Bates method[0], which had been well-debunked already in the mid-20th-century but, like so many quack claims, got a new life from the web.
I agree with you. Glasses and vaccine are great achievements of human civilization but I raised questions about freedom, biology and moral.
I'm not against vaccination I took many of them as a child and I have glasses which help and enhance me significantly but I'm not for mandatory vaccination or COVID passports that my European Union wants to enforce and I'm not for European Union limiting my human rights. We are going back to the days of Hitler where it was more important who you are "biologically" than looking at the fact that we are all humans and that we all have equal rights.
>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.
I agree with you but how safe is mRNA vaccine in the long term? I would rather take "classical" vaccine.
(But it's a good theory, who really knows, amirite?)
Because society has accepted liability for vaccine injury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj... and https://www.medicallicenselawyers.com/blog/covid-19-vaccine-...), it seems to me that it would be good for society for me to make the best choice for myself about the vaccine. Since society will pay if I get hurt, it would be best for me to weigh that in the decision to get vaccinated.
We've had vaccines since 1796 [0] when Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox, a terrible disease that we fully eradicated thanks to vaccination. A disease that you and me don't have to worry about because of vaccines.
(Likewise for Cholera, Tetanus, Polio, Tuberculosis, Meningitis, etc)
Also, trains, cars, planes, cameras, lightbulbs and every invention of Edison are newer technologies than vaccines.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_vaccines