Omicron may have incorporated RNA from a 'common cold virus,' but that doesn't make it a common cold
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The idea that viruses have a tendency to become weaker over time is simply not true. Smith’s “law of declining virulence” was a 19th century construct that has been thoroughly debunked again and again. Without going into the details again, just take itOmicron may have incorporated RNA from a 'common cold virus,' but that doesn't make it a common cold
The idea that viruses have a tendency to become weaker over time is simply not true. Smith’s “law of declining virulence” was a 19th century construct that has been thoroughly debunked again and again. Without going into the details again, just take it as a given — there is no evolutionary pressure that tends to make viruses milder over time. Viruses tend to get more contagious. Whether they cause more serious disease, less serious disease, or say about the same is all a roll of the genetic dice. If the virus could care about things, it wouldn’t care about this. It’s the contagious part that counts. So stories that the COVID-19 will inevitably turn into a cold need to be taken with a grain of salt roughly the size of the Great Pyramid. All that said … a new study (that’s still in preprint, not peer reviewed) suggests that the omicron variant may not be evolving to be “like a cold,” but be different from other COVID-19 variants because it’s is a cold. Or partly a cold. The study suggests that the reason omicron appears to be so divergent, is because it has incorporated portions of another coronavirus entirely. Read more