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In addition to r/brown_felt_hat's answer, Spanish Flu was around World War I, ravaged economies, poverty, illness, and a general lack of resources probably would have confounded its effects.

There were a couple: Dec 2021 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8702434/

but also a counterpoint https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9111207/

a run down of 3 theories (un detected evolution and transmission, long infection of an AIDS patient, or animal spillover) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8757324/

A good web search is "omicron mouse origin" and you'll see a bunch of papers and articles that are interesting

That's how it usually goes with virus, it's their version of natural selection. If they're too strong, they kill the host and that's not good for the perpetuation of the species, so those variations die out. The weaker but more contagious versions are the ones that have more success in reproducing. It's quite fascinating to think about.

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oh so it will take a long time for protons to decay and the universe go back to a soup of subatomic particles (this time the soup is cold). then the black holes take over because these abnormalities don't care about atomic structures, as long as it got mass or energy it's gonna be eaten

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similar viruses don't really compete. you can be infected with multiple COVIDs at the same time. the older variants disappear because of mass immunity, not because of competition.

(New Zealand) I was recently part of a medical trial relating to getting a covid vaccine at the same time as, or 6 weeks after a flu jab. Pfizer funded, double blind, decent sized pool, one of many countries participating, tra la. Results aren’t available publicly yet, but work is being done on the viability of piggybacking them, at the very least.

Anecdotally, I had covid and flu jabs at the same time (soreness at the site etc (and later confirmed when unblinded) and placebo at 6 weeks, no reaction more than swelling at the injection site. Chatting with others in the waiting room, sounded like it was similar in our cohort, at least.

> That’s why we’ve generally observed later variants of some viruses to be less fatal. It doesn’t do a virus much good to kill its host.

While this is somewhat true, there are important limitations to this model. If a virus has already done enough spreading, from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't matter much if the patient dies later. Another factor, observed in Delta variant, is that having a respiratory virus that is more contagious might also mean it is more deadly, because it is disrupting more cells to produce more viruses.

From what I remember in virology. A lot of what everyone is saying is true. Considering that an infected host results in some 8 trillion replicated virus’s, any variants that help it replicate and survive more effectively will be come an additional strain. The general trend of the virus should be similar to that off parasites. ‘A good parasite doesn’t kill its host’. That is to say it should just jack you up and not kill. Unlike Ebola, which burns through those close to each patient zero. I will say that each virus is unique and the above are only generalizations.

In Canada, I believe the guideline is 6 months between boosters or after an infection.

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Australia had very aggressive lock downs to manage Delta, since most Australians still weren't vaccinated in the second half of 2021 and some states were entirely COVID free and wanted to stay that way.

The hard lockdowns significantly slowed the spread of Delta but weren't able to drop the numbers. In NZ they were able to reduce number of Delta cases but their lock downs were in even stricter (take-away food was closed for five weeks I recall) and ultimately they decided to relent a little, there was a hard boundary around Auckland and changed lockdown levels from 5 to 4 I believe.

I can't remember the Australian hospitalisations numbers from that time but you might be able to find them online somewhere, try ABC or Chris Billington.

Mitigation.

One of the biggest concerns is that the tcell damage makes it susceptible or oncogenic. Which might (note, "might") explain some cancer cases around the world.

So mitigation is important.

I thought about an Australopithecus analogy, but thought readers might grasp the idea of bringing back the wooly mammoth as it's currently in the news (along with the dodo). Apart from that, I've lost track of whether omicron is a straight derivative of delta, or if they have a shared common ancestor - which would make it more like the mammoth analogy ;)

Actually, according to this article in Science, it looks more like they shared a common ancestor....so, mammoth rather than Homo erectus.

I don't know about specific viruses, but regarding evolution:

Nothing really "wants" to do anything or "knows how to" do anything in this way. It's a simple way of explaining it, that's all.

Before this trait evolved in rabies, let's say, it didn't compel hosts to bite other animals.

Eventually one strain of rabies had a random mutation that made the host more aggressive, or maybe salivate more - something that would cause it to bite or attack.

This particular strain spread really well, because that's a good advantage. This "biting" strain is now the dominant strain - most rabies strains make hosts bite other animals...

So, the virus doesn't want to do anything. It's just the most successful "breed" of virus, so it survived.

A lot of mutations are negative - they usually die out.

This is just an example, not how rabies evolved exactly.

Evidence is now leaning towards the possibility that it came from an immunocompromised person who had a very long infection - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35739343/

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The idea is, if protons do indeed randomly decay (over extremely long periods of time), then a neutron star will very slowly lose mass via this process, with protons in its thin outer crust very occasionally evaporating. After about 10^(38) years, enough mass will have been lost that the neutron star finally reaches a tipping point where it is light enough to not be a neutron star anymore. So it explodes into a white dwarf.

Delta is not the ancestor of Omicron. Delta did not "evolve into" Omicron — it doesn't even have alpha variant in its lineage.

Another way this analogy breaks down is that humans have sexual reproduction whereas viruses are almost entirely asexual (with rare gene transfer exceptions). Neanderthal genes can enter humans because they are sexually compatible, but viruses have to rely on convergent evolution.