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While true over longer periods of time, that first point is also a platitude that feels nice but is not necessarily true on a local scale. Delta was demonstrably more deadly than its predecessors. Also, while the disease is less "severe" in terms of killing people, it's still a nasty sickness that does very strange things to your body. A large proportion of people with long covid had a mild acute illness yet are still ending up with bizarre metabolic dysfunction or having their senses (smell, hearing, vestibular) damaged.

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Autonomic dysfunction, metabolic dysfunction, all kinds of other terrible things. It's a great disabling event that people have collectively tried to ignore out of existence and it isn't working.

All cause excess mortality is way up too, which means covid is killing far more people after the acute phase of the illness, even when it was originally mild.

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To me, deadly should mean "how many people did it kill in a given time period." Rabies kills basically everyone who gets it, but I would never call rabies more deadly than covid, because barely anyone ever gets rabies. Rabies just can't be very deadly because it can't infect many people, while covid is very deadly because it infects lots of people. If two diseases have the same infection fatality rate, but one is more infectious, it would be silly to say that it isn't more deadly.

Obviously, it's why we have specific definitions like case fatality rate and infection fatality rate.

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Also, the fact that COVID jumped species is a blaring example of a disease mutating for the worse..

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I have not seen strong evidence of a meaningful effect size when it comes to long term adverse outcomes in mild cases when limiting my search to robust, high quality studies, so given that this is a science sub, I’d love to see your citations. In my experience reading papers related to long Covid, the following applies:

• findings are often limited to a cohort of older or hospitalized patients

• when findings are generalized to mild cases, this is done by conducting a (voluntary) survey, almost always with abysmal response rates. It’s not viable to measure hazard ratios when 25% of your sample responded to your survey, since response bias has the potential to modulate those HRs by up to 4x.

• findings are nebulous or poorly defined, for example “any Covid symptom after 28 days” is often considered LC, which groups someone who has a lingering cough at 29 days in the same group as someone who has debilitating fatigue 3 months down the line. This lack of granularity limits the ability to draw conclusions about what “nasty things” are happening.

To date, I have yet to find a study which combines the following:

• uses health database data to avoid the bias inherent in voluntary responses

• performs subgroup analyses by age and pre-existing health, as well as clinical severity of the case

• adequately captures severity and duration of LC in the analysis.

Thus, the question “how much more likely is a healthy 30 year old to have lifestyle-limiting fatigue 6 months after mild Covid” remains unanswered.

The closest parallels I have found are studies which example very specific neuropsychiatric outcomes, such as this paper: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00260-7/fulltext

If you’re scientifically inclined it’s a fantastic read. It breaks down the neurological outcome trajectories for COVID patients compared to a matched control group with another URI by age and other factors.

If anything, what the study tells me is that we under-estimate the risks of regular old URIs that aren’t Covid.

Case in point, for the “adults” group, which excludes older adults and children, the total cumulative risk after 2 years was 29.2% after Covid, and 29.1% after another URI.

That difference is not statistically significant.

Wouldn’t that mean all viruses should eventually mutate into harmless but fast spreading illnesses? Or is that something specific of coronaviruses?

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>Viruses don't want to kill the host,

This isn't really true. Viruses mutate to spread faster. Covid never killed a meaningful number of hosts as it is (from the perspective of spreading), and even the ones that did die can spread it for weeks before they go. This isn't a desease where you get it and die immediately and never was. Covid doesn't really care if you die or clear the virus after 14 days. Either way it's been passed on.

There really isn't any pressure for it to get less dangerous.

There is pressure for it to not kill hosts before they are able to infect others though.

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I don't have time to read that entire paper, but it's also more focused on somewhat severe and specific neurological problems, which isn't really what I'm talking about.

https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/12/11/1026/htm

I don't have any giant studies about long covid outcomes relative to the population baseline, but here is one interesting one that takes a small random sample of post-covid (but fully recovered) and PASC (post-acute sequelae) individuals and does an in-depth metabolic panel. The noteworthy part here is that they excluded anyone who had hospitalized or had abnormal chest CT post-covid, limiting it to less severe cases.

The discussion mentions that, on average, PASC individuals were more likely to be younger. It acknowledges that this could be due to sampling error (younger people more likely to take sequelae more seriously), warranting further investigation, but could also be due to "exuberant immune response," which (if true) would go to show that there's more to it than just comorbidities.

And of course I am biased, as a fit and previously healthy mid-20s-year-old with VOR disfunction and persistent, nonspecific fatigue and digestive problems, 9 months post mild-Covid. But anecdotally, my doctors have described seeing many patients with similar issues (especially vestibular).

My point was also not to suggest that the average 30 year old would be debilitated by COVID, but simply that "it's getting less deadly on average" does not mean that it cannot still inflict unpleasant sequelae that are life-altering even if they seem mild compared to strokes and seizures. COVID is a disease of "manageable but weird and annoying debilitation" in my eyes, which is why long covid remains simultaneously a big problem but also somewhat elusive and difficult to characterize. It isn't going to bring down society, just leave some of us feeling shittier for an unknown/indefinite period of time.

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I would bet Covid has done a bang up job at damaging the circulatory system on millions (through inflammation of the heart’s muscle tissue is my guess), because a stat I saw and can’t find at this moment had a significant increase in heart related deaths since 2019.

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BF.7 actually refers to the name of the variant where each variant will have a whole host of mutations that define it. That aside, the current epidemiological situation in China results from the dropping of their "zero covid" policy. Due to this alone, there are a couple things happening:

• BF.7 is highly immune evasive, people vaccinated in China (even with 3 doses) are very unlikely to be protected from infection. Vaccination coverage is extremely low in the most vulnerable age groups. ~40% of elderly above age 80 have a 3rd dose, ~70% have 2 doses. This likely increases the amount of deaths reported as BF.7 does not show any noticeable changes in clinical severity compared to other Omicron subvariants. At the current time, it's more likely we're seeing a founder effect where the initial strain to first hit the population will dominate the landscape regardless of how fit the virus is. For example, XBB is way more fit to sweep China but that isn't happening (yet). This leads into my next point:

• We're seeing unprecedented infections in a population that is largely infection naïve. Compared to the rest of world where there is stronger hybrid immunity built up from vaccination + infection induced immunity, China is facing the 1st wave in a population with solely boosted immunity. As seen in the rest of the world, current variants were capable of causing waves every couple months in spite of infection-induced immunity.

• 3 doses (Coronavac) + BF.7 infection also does not provide strong protection from infection against the variants that are currently the most dominant around the world (XBB and BQ.1.1).

On the other hand there are some upsides:

• BF.7 has circulated widely around the world and was detected in many different countries prior to China's current predicament. BF.7 was de-escalated from monitoring in the UK for low growth rates. BF.7 still makes up a sizeable proportion of sequences at the moment (<10% depending on the country) but BQ.1.1, BQ.1.1.10, XBB.1 and XBB.1.5 are now currently the variants to watch.

• China's approval of an inhaled vaccine may help to curb infections. Something the rest of the world should adopt. Though it's unknown how widespread its deployment is and whether it was given to enough people to curb infections (unlikely considering the numbers we're seeing)

That said, there is definitely cause for concern. Globally, sequencing for SARS-CoV-2 has dropped 90% and widespread infections in such a large population (in a short time) could be cause for worry due to the possible emergence of a new variant. Certain countries are in response testing for novel mutations that might pop up from inbound travelers.

For further reading:

on variants and mutations

overview of BF.7

Coronavac vaccine against dominant variants

There's no bet about it. It does damage to our vascular system. From there they have seen damage to nearly every organ. Evidence of it damaging our immune systems as well. The fact that the world took its foot off the research funding gas pedal will needlessly cost the world countless lives and trillions of dollars in health care costs. We're just so damn flawed as a species to be so short-sighted.

Our brains weren’t designed to comprehend the scope of social media, global travel, and biased media sources, let alone all of them acting in concert with conflicting interests to the survival of the species. To make it worse, some of the best minds on the planet have been corrupted for decades, their work product going to disinformation instead of science that might have slowed or stopped the climate catastrophe that is humanity’s growth.

is the US omicron booster effective against BF.7 variant?

how deadly and how transmissible is the BF.7 strain compared to other strains? I think Delta was the deadliest right?

As far as inhaled vaccine? Has this gone through FDA testing in the US? Is it just as effective as a shot?

Is the inhaled vaccine like that flu vaccine they spray up your nose or are we talking like an asthma inhaler?

Right - and if the period where you're contagious the most is before you're symptomatic, there is functionally no pressure not to kill the host. No pressure to kill it either. No pressure either way, and we keep flipping that coin, hoping it lands heads.

It is also important to note that the population of China was only offered the Chinese made vaccine that was only ever had an efficacy of 50%.

Yep the bivalent (BA.5) booster will fare better against BF.7. The US has inhaled vaccines under development but those haven't gotten that far partly due to funding, research, or political reasons.

BF.7 is a bit more immune evasive + transmissible compared to BA.5 and shows reduced sensitivity to monoclonal antibodies likely due to an amino acid change at R346T.

China's is inhaled through the mouth with a nebulizer. India also has one that's a nasal spray. The idea behind both is to not only protect against severe disease but also stop infection + transmission. It's great for children or for anyone that just doesn't prefer a jab

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The developer of the inhaled vaccine that was approved in September (CanSino Biologics) has not submitted an application seeking the U.S. FDA's authorization to date for their Convidecia Air vaccine and it doesn't look like they have announced an intention to do so. They have some clinical trials sponsored for the vaccine, but none appear to be registered to enroll participants in the U.S.

Some have expressed skepticism over the benefit that these kinds of vaccines could offer relative to currently available vaccines in the U.S., including recently in a viewpoint co-authored by the FDA's top-ranking vaccines official Peter Marks:

"It is also not at all clear from well-controlled clinical trials that administering existing vaccines by the intranasal route (as some countries have already even approved) will provide truly meaningful benefit over the existing generation of COVID-19 vaccines. Such limitations were recently illustrated by the disappointing results with a viral-vectored vaccine administered intranasally in an early-phase clinical trial."

Yeah, which has nothing to do with covid. Covid never killed the host that quickly, there was never pressure for it to get less dangerous.