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I'm not a science person nor do I know how a virus kills a human body but this one is for sure something amazing. What we can't see can lead you to an absolute death destroying your whole body, it certainly is quite shocking. It's 2020 and we are still losing so many lives, yet we are still lucky to be alive because of the advancement in medicine and health care.


It's a virus that is completely unadapted to the human body, fresh off the boat from whatever animal it evolved on. It's like an early prototype medication: it already has the desired effect (reproduction in a body part that serves as a launch pad for transmission to other hosts), but it's chock-full off side effects. Unfortunately, it is so good at pre-symptomatic transmission that those side effects impose very little selection pressure.

At this point we have an interesting link to the topic of contact tracing apps: if we shift our countermeasures from wholesale isolation to fast, computerized contact tracing that is fast enough to overtake the infectivity/symptom last, it will increase the evolutionary advantage of less damaging strains (asymptomatic cases don't trigger a contacts cascade)


If you compare it to MERS/SARS it is actually less harmful (at an individual level) than those. But of course this ends up meaning more harmful at a collective level since it takes a while for people to develop symptoms while still being able to infect other people.




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