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Medicine

New Coronavirus 'Losing Potency', Top Italian Doctor Says (reuters.com) 224

Posted by msmash from the maintain-caution dept.
Reuters: The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday. "In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy," said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy's coronavirus contagion. "The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago," he told RAI television. Italy has the third highest death toll in the world from COVID-19, with 33,415 people dying since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21. It has the sixth highest global tally of cases at 233,019.

However new infections and fatalities have fallen steadily in May and the country is unwinding some of the most rigid lockdown restrictions introduced anywhere on the continent. Zangrillo said some experts were too alarmist about the prospect of a second wave of infections and politicians needed to take into account the new reality. "We've got to get back to being a normal country," he said. "Someone has to take responsibility for terrorizing the country." The government urged caution, saying it was far too soon to claim victory.
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New Coronavirus 'Losing Potency', Top Italian Doctor Says More

New Coronavirus 'Losing Potency', Top Italian Doctor Says

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  • Maybe it's not the virus that changed... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @12:15PM (#60131276)
    ... but the potency of the immune systems of those who did not already die in northern Italy? I have not seen yet any scientific papers discussing this effect, but if there is a certain sub-group of a population particularly susceptible to a certain virus, then one should expect what looks like a "less potent virus" in the remaining population after a first wave of infections.

    • but there is some science, not new (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MattMann ( 102516 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @12:52PM (#60131410)

      this news meshes with some other news that's come out this week, that the covid-19 infection pattern does match something like (too lazy to look it up and not an expert so I'll just wing it here) "T cell resistance" by which I mean the familiar idea that if you go around eating dirt on the daily, it charges up your T cells for resisting classes of viruses. So the idea is that the reason we see the virus peak, drop, and not shoot back up again is that a lot of people have T cells that come from having been exposed to many different corona viruses on the reg, and they are more immune than we think. It also would explain why some people suffer much more severe effects than others in the course of the infection.

    • Re:Maybe it's not the virus that changed... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @01:07PM (#60131486)

      Actually this is how a typical process of natural selection of novel pathogens like this particular coronavirus go. Most people forget that primary opponents of any new viral agent are not our immune systems but other strains of the same virus competing for the same cells in human body. That means that various strains of this virus compete with one another for living space.

      And that automatically selects for more benign traits over time, because strains that don't kill the host and therefore don't die with the host. (And need a live specimen to spread rather than a dead one as is the case with most viruses that are spread via cough and similar symptoms - dead people don't cough). Such strains tend to be more effective at spreading, giving it a distinct evolutionary advantage.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Sique ( 173459 )
        It doesn't even take other virus strains as antagonists. It's purely evolution. If you kill your host too early, you can't propagate. So any virus variation that killed their hosts before they could infect other people, dies out. And those strains who keep their host alive the longest, have the best chance to propagate. And that also means: making the host less sick, so he stays active and mingles with other people.

        We've seen the same with other pandemics. For instance, Syphilis, which killed off their ho

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          It doesn't even take other virus strains as antagonists. It's purely evolution. If you kill your host too early, you can't propagate. So any virus variation that killed their hosts before they could infect other people, dies out. And those strains who keep their host alive the longest, have the best chance to propagate. And that also means: making the host less sick, so he stays active and mingles with other people.

          And this was why I quit playing Plague Inc. This strategy worked too well - you would spend a

        • It seems like Covid-19 becomes infectious well before it becomes mortally dangerous. All the info I've seen says you are infectious on day 2 or 3, but you may not die until week 3 - if you die at all, well over 90% survive.

          Syphilis is qualitatively different, and not a good comparison, they spread by completely different methods. Braggadocio and prostitutes aside, most don't have sex with more than 1 person in the span of a few weeks. Especially not unprotected, penetrative sex. Meanwhile most people come w

      • "Opponents" is too strong a word, IMO, but the basic idea is correct.

        Competing for the exact cells is not necessarily so important, but it is more a matter of how a the whole host's immune system changes over time. Assuming the host survives, infection by one variant tends to greatly speed up and/or boost the whole immune system of the victim against most other variants. This is because the immune system is faster at churning out antibodies to antigens that look similar to something they have seen before,

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        That's correct, but it takes far to long to be relevant to us right now.

        Given that only around 1% of people infected die, a more deadly strain is only hurt by its deadliness at most 1% of the time. Moreover, the transmission is most likely to have occurred before symptoms became severe enough for that person to die, perhaps as much as 9 in 10 of those that died would have no effect on the virus's ability to transmit.

        That means the virus would be far more affected by its virulence than its deadliness. Only a

      • Actually this is how a typical process of natural selection of novel pathogens like this particular coronavirus go. Most people forget that primary opponents of any new viral agent are not our immune systems but other strains of the same virus competing for the same cells in human body. That means that various strains of this virus compete with one another for living space.

        That's not how natural selection works. Our immune system is the primary opponent of the virus. Most of those whose immune systems we

    • It doesn't even require a sub-group since any large population is going to have enough variation that some will be more susceptible than others through random mutations. However, we don't even need to consider that. With COVID-19 we've known that the mortality rate is highest among the elderly who have other underlying medication conditions. Eventually any infection left sufficiently unchecked will spread through the entire population and people other fought it off or succumbed to that infection.

      It's pos

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        It's very important to know which scenario we are dealing with here.

        If there is a new weak strain running around Italy which immunizes those infected against the most dangerous strain, then opening up in countries where this strain has not spread (due to travel restrictions) would be a disaster and cause many more fatalities. Learning to identitify the new strain to see where it has spread would be critical.

        If there's no new strain and the results are just due to changes in who is tested and and when, it w

  • Well that's great, for him and the area he lives in.

    It may be that the 'summer will be better' theory is true, and the virus will stay in retreat for a while, maybe long enough to kill it off completely in areas (until brought in from elsewhere). If these safe areas can stop people travelling in and out they should keep it at bay (until some idiot breaks it). However, it could simply be the effect of an effective lockdown. It could be that a far weaker strain has taken over. We should wait for scientists to

    • You may be spot on, and you may be overly pessimistic. The only way to find out is to wait and see, and unfortunately, patience is something the public at large has in short supply.

      It gives me some hope that it seems to be losing potency. That may be because everyone has largely been exposed at this point. At minimum it's looking like 10x more people have been exposed than showed symptoms. It might be even higher. If that's the case, we may just have another version of the seasonal cold/flu on our hands.

      It

  • User kot-begemot-uk Nailed It! (Score:4)

    by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @12:24PM (#60131302)
    From Finally. Halleluyah. A Family Tree of the Coronavirus [fagain.co.uk]:

    Our only chance is Darwin. By isolating the nasty cases and quarantining all of their potential carriers we apply massive selective pressure on the virus to become more bening. We have to maintain the quarantine and continue this evolutionary pressure until this becomes a common cold (which it will in a couple of months). The ideas by people like Bloody Stupid Johnson to let it rip are beyond criminal.

    • By isolating the nasty cases and quarantining all of their potential carriers we apply massive selective pressure on the virus to become more bening.

      What? How? The virus doesn't know how many other strains are left in the world. If it kills its host then it stops spreading regardless of distancing.

      We have to maintain the quarantine and continue this evolutionary pressure until this becomes a common cold (which it will in a couple of months).

      A couple of months? What? It's already been a couple months. Where are you getting this shit?

  • Why should we listen to him? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drew_kime ( 303965 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @12:26PM (#60131308) Journal

    He's the head of a hospital? Okay. So he's got statistics from the entire country that other people don't have access to. No?

    Then he's a trained epidemiologist. No?

    Then he's an expert in public policy, or has at least been elected to be responsible for it. No?

    So why exactly are we listening to this guy? Oh, right, he's got that that snappy "take responsibility for terrorizing the country" click-bait-ey quote. Great. Get back to me when he's got more than anecdotes and clever quotes.

  • “We’ve got to get back to being a normal country,” he said. “Someone has to take responsibility for terrorizing the country.”

    Using charged language like "terrorizing" in this context makes it sound like someone with a less than honest agenda.

    Anyway, can anyone weigh in on how a virus can "lose potency"? Is this just because people have less viral load when they get it? If so then wouldn't that be because of social distancing and lock downs? Or did we somehow get lucky an

    • Re:This part makes me worried (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tragedy ( 27079 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @01:04PM (#60131468)

      Retroviruses are very fast mutating viruses and multiple strains develop. The more infected hosts there are, the faster it will mutate and develop new strains. Some of those strains will be more infectious and/or more fatal, and others will be less infectious and/or less fatal. For example, it already appears that the dominant strain of this coronavirus in new infections is actually a more infectious strain than the original.

      I think the idea behind the virus "losing potency" is that less deadly strains emerge and spread and supplant the more deadly version. That may be possible, but it's only effective if the new strains are more infectious. Otherwise, they're simply outmatched by more infectious versions. Also, it relies on the less deadly version of the virus inoculating the infected against the more deadly version. If you can simply be infected by both versions, then it doesn't help. At the same time, more deadly strains may emerge and spread.

      Another possibility is that "losing potency" is pseudo-scientific garbage and the doctor in question doesn't know what he's talking about. Optionally, he's just talking down to his audience.

      • I think an infinity more likely reason would be that dead people don't spread virus' like this one very well and people in hospitals are much less likely to spread the disease then people out walking around in public. This creates a scenario where the worst versions of this virus are being reigned in, meanwhile the milder version of the disease runs freely as many people won't take milder symptoms seriously enough to do much about.

        Basically, we're watching evolution at work with humans acting as the evoluti

  • Actual experts disagree. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bluegutang ( 2814641 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @12:47PM (#60131374)

    This Alberto Zangrillo is not an epidemiologist, and with populist quotes like "Someone has to take responsibility for terrorizing the country", he does not come off as a responsible professional.

    Meanwhile, actual epidemiologists reject his conclusion. [sciencemediacentre.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      This Alberto Zangrillo is not an epidemiologist, and with populist quotes like "Someone has to take responsibility for terrorizing the country", he does not come off as a responsible professional.

      Meanwhile, actual epidemiologists reject his conclusion. [sciencemediacentre.org]

      Indeed. Somebody _unqualified_ that is potentially doing massive damage by doing politics. I think this guy needs his academic title removed because of massively unethical behavior. For some people, as soon as they are professors, they completely forget that they are experts at only a few things (if that) and suddenly feel they can competently comment on anything, and completely ignore the damage they do.

  • Unfortunately, we are now playing with the lives of people. Who will want to take the responsibility of opening up and stake their well-being on such authority? Do you want to be the one that gets the blame for opening too soon because you wanted to be cautious? At the same time, how long can a nation remain under lock down? Who gets to make that judgement call? Even those that wish to go back to work what happens if they become infected and somehow infected their loved ones and now they may have to live wi

  • This is the key point!

  • In assessing any dramatic change in the pandemic I would much rather see multi-author paper, with the backing of a credible institution, on a real scientific journal site than the comments of one doctor, no matter how prominent, to a Reuters reporter.

  • Remember Y2K? (Score:3)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @02:16PM (#60131826)
    Billions were spent on fixing problems that would arise when the year changed from 1999 to 2000. And after this spend, what happened? Nothing.

    Which was exactly what we spent the money for. For nothing to happen.

    Same with lockdown. The outcome in the UK for example is bad, but not so bad that it was worth the cost of lockdown. What people forget is that without lockdown things would have been ten times worse. (I assume that at some point people would have stayed at home anyway out of fear, with the same cost as lockdown).

  • Multiple strains...

    Bad strains kill their host and terminate there; if no re-infections then that strain stops dead in it's tracks.
    Mild strains don't kill their host, indeed the milder the symptoms the more prevalent that strain will go on to live long and if mild enough prosper.

    Possibly the strain variants are close enough so that the mild strains infer immunity against the bad strains.

    Obviously people on the edge of life may be affected as usual as it doesn't take much to be the straw that breaks the prov

    • Considering that it has two asymptomatic but infectious weeks I'd say even the strain that kills is good enough to procreate.

  • ...but it also seems like a lot of people here are rather angry about it, and their first reaction is to deprecate, question, or otherwise weaken it.

    Curious.

  • No longer exists? (Score:3)

    by superdave80 ( 1226592 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @07:38PM (#60133136)

    "In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,"

    Really? 400-500 new cases and 50-100 deaths per day the last week. Yes, it's MUCH better than 1-2 months ago, but the phrase 'clinically no longer exists in Italy' makes no logical sense to me.

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