Private channel session 372
9 messages over 34m, 2020-09-11 – 2020-09-11.
A “conversation” here is an activity session — a run of messages with under 60 minutes of silence inside it. The channel had no native conversation boundaries.
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Eddie, great OpEd - something like that was needed! One thing though: "The coronavirus's sluggish pace of mutation is good news for us: A virus that evolved more rapidly would have agreater chance of outrunning any vaccines or drugs developed to counter it."I don't think we can say this for two reasons: (1) there's currently no vaccine induced selection pressure on the viral population, but lord knows what it'll do once there is, and, most importantly, (2) what we _don't_ capture via the evolutionary rate estimates is the rather frequent strange recombination events observed in SARS-CoV-2 - all ofthose are masked out in alignments and phylogenetic analyses, because it's a different evolutionary process (it's -very interestingly - driven by the proofreading activity of the virus... go figure). Especially the latter point is important when we think about vaccine escape since big and consequential genomic rearrangements can happen really quickly.
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Logically, I would say that a lower rate of evolution must also reduce the rate of antigenic drift (particularly if a lot ofthe mutations in SARS-CoV-2 are APOBEC related). But, that said, I agree with your points. What you ought toknow is that my original submission looked absolutely *nothing* like what I submitted. Nothing. I never had a sectionon reinfection for a starter. The Editor re-wrote everything. It was torture. Just torture. My original statement on the vaccines said: "SARS-CoV-2 is in the evolutionary slow lane for an RNA virus. This is good news because it means that the virus will find it just a bit harder to 'escape' from any future vaccines or antiviral drugs if and when they are developed". So, not quite the same.
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Well, whatever the editor did the product is still very good :wink:. That's funny about the reinfection part, because I _did_ find that a little out of place - and the concern here isn't asmuch that people are reinfected with a more dangerous virus, it's just the fact that they're reinfected in the first place... (which, as you - or the editor... - say is what we'd expect - but we don't yet know how frequent reinfections are (on this point, I'm concerned - very. But I'm a pessimist)).
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(and by concerned, I mean that I think after a few months, a good proportion of people are probably going to be susceptible - I wouldn't be surprised if we're at ~50% being susceptible after 6-9 months...)
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Exactly! I didn't want any of that in but she insisted! It was a fight. I added a bit saying that there were too few casesof reinfection to conclude anything but she said it was too vague.
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I had bits about the possible evolution of seasonality and more emerging coronaviruses in the future but they were all axed. It was brutal.
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One for the memoirs anyway.
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Hah - well all that stuff can be used for the next OpEd in 6 months when we have answers to all these various questions! :beer:
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Totally!