I could be wrong, but I feel the opposite is happening. Much of what I have been reading is that the virus appears to becoming more contagious, but LESS LETHAL.
And I feel like there will be several effective Vaccines very soon, that will help tremendously.
On top of that, we are much better at treating it than we were at the start. And it is the younger population that has been passing it around to each other.
Although there have been thousands of new cases in colleges , there have been very few deaths among students.
So I do not believe we are heading towards massive death surges, but I could be wrong.
Covid-19 becomes more contagious and less lethal
Covid-19 becomes more contagious and less lethal
A team of scientists from the Houston Methodist Hospital recently performed the analysis of the molecular structure of the covid-19 virus and obtained as a result in the samples that the coronavirus strain suffered a mutation that makes it more contagious.
The president of Pathology and Genomic Medicine at the Jim Musser Center explained that "this mutation helps the virus to spread faster."
To carry out the research, more than 5.000 covid-19 genomes were analyzed, which were recovered from the first wave of the pandemic in the city of Houston and the most recent outbreak of infections that is still ongoing.
The researchers specify in the study that when evaluating patients infected with the mutated strain, they presented a higher viral load; however, "no evidence was found" that this change in structure made the virus more lethal.
Musser commented that "the single mutation in the spike protein results in a greater amount of virus in the upper respiratory tract and that probably helps it spread faster, but does not cause a worse disease or invade better," he said. the specialist.
Covid-19 is becoming less deadly in Europe but we don't know why
Covid-19 is becoming less deadly in Europe but we don't know why
HEALTH 24 August 2020
It is becoming increasingly clear that people are less likely to die if they get
covid-19 now compared with earlier in the pandemic, at least in Europe, but the reasons why are still shrouded in uncertainty.
One UK doctor has
said that the coronavirus was “getting a little bit less angry”, while an infectious disease consultant at the National University of Singapore
claimed that a mutated version of the
coronavirus, D614G, is making the illness less deadly.
In England, the proportion of people infected by the coronavirus who later died was certainly lower in early August than it was in late June. Over the period, this infection fatality rate (IFR) dropped by between 55 and 80 per cent, depending on which data set was used,
found Jason Oke at the University of Oxford and his colleagues.
“This doesn’t seem to be the same disease or as lethal as it was earlier on when we saw huge numbers of people dying,” he says. For example, the week beginning 17 August
saw 95 people die and just over 7000 cases across the UK. In the first week of April, 7164 died and nearly 40,000 tested positive.
Dividing deaths by cases gives a crude case fatality rate of around 1 per cent in August, compared with nearly 18 per cent in April. These figures don’t represent the true IFRs at these times, both because deaths lag behind infections by a few weeks, and because testing regimes have changed over time, but are indicative of a shift in the IFR. Oke and his colleagues used a more sophisticated method to estimate the change in IFR.
The situation isn’t unique to England and the rest of the UK, says Oke, who has found the same trend repeated across Europe.
Also:
Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Trial Enters Phase 3
Johnson & Johnson’s potential coronavirus vaccine begins Phase 3 trials in the US today. The trial will include up to 60,000 adult participants at nearly 215 sites. The first participants will receive doses on Wednesday. Johnson & Johnson becomes the fouth company to begin phase 3 testing for a COVID-19 vaccine in the US – joining Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca.
