“Clinically no longer exists': Doctor claims coronavirus is losing potency

Australian Associated Press
Yahoo News Australia31 May 2020, 7:03 pm GMT-4


The coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor says.

"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.

Due to warmer weather or some other factor? Seems to be exploding in Brazil which is hot.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idUSKBN2370OQ

Here is the whole article. I don’t think they mentioned heat, but It seems similar to some other virus that gradually weakened as they spread. SARS?

Viral attenuation is a thing. As a virus moves through a population, it weakens through a process called lethal mutagenesis. Basically mutations build up reducing the efficacy and eventually wind up killing off the virus.

They also make vaccines from this process by forcing attenuation. These vaccines are called “live attenuated”.

Nu! Miss you on PPW man, hope things are well!

Serious question because I don't know the answer, and I'm not typically a conspiracy theorist, but can a virus be engineered to have an attenuation schedule?

Serious answer: not a chance in hell (maybe a God-like intellect could, but we can't).

While most living cells in multi-cell organisms have a mechanism to limit reproduction cycles (to prevent runaways, aka cancer), that would be hard to do for a virus. Also viruses reproduce a LOT, many, many orders of magnitude more than the cells in your body, so the odds of such a mechanism surviving intact for long is very low. Also the mechanism itself would be a molecular chain, kind of like a crypto-currency blockchain in reverse... in a cell the chain starts long and gets shorter each time it reproduces, when it runs out, you're done. I suspect it would not be possible to fit a long enough chain into a virus to get any sort of meaningful number of cycles (a virus will reproduce billions of times as it spreads through a large host population).

Also very hard to do anything like that without leaving genetic evidence, and that would be very dangerous. COVID for example has killed enough Americans to be considered a large-scale WMD attack if it were intentional... and the likely US response to that is fairly obvious (hint: we only possess one type of WMD).

A virus can be engineered to attenuate forward without the possibility of reversing. Mutation is still random, and not based on a set time schedule. This is how some current vaccines work.

Well that’s good news.

So the rioters don’t need masks?

They still do, just for the tear gas and not the virus