> That hasn't stopped the virus from spreading with increasing effectiveness
It really doesn't. They've finally stopped talking about the idiocy of every single new variant being 2x to 4x times as transmissible as the last variant because the math would be fucking stupid with an R(t) of something like >1024 by now.
They've been conflating immune evasion with intrinsic transmissibility for the past several years. That has finally started to disappear.
> each time it moves to a new host it has a chance to mutate into something we aren't able to defend against,
Except that we're not observing any pattern of mutations around T-cell epitopes in the virus suggestive of any risk of immune escape from T-cell recognition -- which it the important defense against severe disease and death and those defenses that we have are what has turned the virus milder.
The whole reason why we likely have a two tiered immune system[*] with fast neutralizing antibodies and slow T-cells is likely because the end product of 500 million years or so of evolution favored immune systems that were clever enough to force these kinds of viruses to evolve to escape only the first line of defense.
> The loss of warning signs letting us know when we're infected is a bad sign.
No, that's a sign our immune systems work and its not their first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
Really, how counterintuitively up your own ass do you have to be to take the very clear signs that the symptoms are abating and turn that into something to fear.
[*] well multi-tiered, but those are the two biggies of the adaptive immune system.
It really doesn't. They've finally stopped talking about the idiocy of every single new variant being 2x to 4x times as transmissible as the last variant because the math would be fucking stupid with an R(t) of something like >1024 by now.
They've been conflating immune evasion with intrinsic transmissibility for the past several years. That has finally started to disappear.
> each time it moves to a new host it has a chance to mutate into something we aren't able to defend against,
Except that we're not observing any pattern of mutations around T-cell epitopes in the virus suggestive of any risk of immune escape from T-cell recognition -- which it the important defense against severe disease and death and those defenses that we have are what has turned the virus milder.
The whole reason why we likely have a two tiered immune system[*] with fast neutralizing antibodies and slow T-cells is likely because the end product of 500 million years or so of evolution favored immune systems that were clever enough to force these kinds of viruses to evolve to escape only the first line of defense.
> The loss of warning signs letting us know when we're infected is a bad sign.
No, that's a sign our immune systems work and its not their first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
Really, how counterintuitively up your own ass do you have to be to take the very clear signs that the symptoms are abating and turn that into something to fear.
[*] well multi-tiered, but those are the two biggies of the adaptive immune system.