ollie989898
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Could the Coronavirus Be Weakening as It Spreads?
Comments from two Italian doctors have triggered a wave of expert rebukes, but not everyone thinks that their views are far-fetched
elemental.medium.com
OnMay 31, the news agency Reuters published an article with an optimistic but incendiary headline: “New coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says.”
The story included comments from hospital leaders in Milan and Genoa, cities in two regions of northern Italy that have been hit hard by Covid-19. The doctors’ comments were pulled from published news reports in the Italian media, and both suggested that the virus is growing weaker. Matteo Bassetti, MD, PhD, is head of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the San Martino-IST University Hospital and a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Genoa. He is quoted in the Reuters piece as saying that, “The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today.”
Reached for comment on Tuesday, Bassetti elaborated on his prior statement for Elemental. “What is happening in our hospitals — at least in the northern part of Italy — the clinical impression is that the disease is now different compared to the disease of three months ago,” he says. “The majority of patients who presented in our emergency rooms or wards during March and April were very sick with acute respiratory distress syndrome, shock, multiple organ failure, and the majority died in the first days after admission. Now in May, we no longer see these types of patients.”
The above is pretty controversial to say the least but I thought I would post it here for interest.
One the one hand, the idea that the virus is losing it's virulence as it's genome is diluted (remember it was probably an animal virus to begin with) does reconcile with our experience of other viruses like HIV (which used to kill people within months in the past) which definitely became a lot more user-friendly over time.
On the other hand, it is possible that the viral load people are being infected by in recent weeks is a lot lower than the bigger doses experienced by those in the outbreak initially. This gives people a longer time for the immune system to line up it's ducks before the disease can proliferate and cause big problems.