Cold Covid - part the eighteenth

It's been mentioned a number of times around these here parts that home testing for Covid is a bargain with the Devil. In some ways, an accurate home test makes it easier for Real Libertarian Americans to control their lives without interference from Big Gummint. Which, of course, is horseshit in the case of epidemics.

Even if home tests were 100% accurate and timely, one might argue such would be the worst case scenario, the public health authorities are totally handicapped in managing the pathogen. Without central data collection Covid-ο would never have been identified. All we would know, today, is that hospitalizations are rising, significantly, over the last month.

Finding new mutations, there will continue to be new mutations thanks in no small part to the Rednecks refusing to mitigate and vaccinate, is the only way we get out of this mess. OTOH, if we can rely on Constant Power^©, we may see Covid-19 devolve into the fifth common cold coronavirus. And, by the bye, that coronaviruses are a source of the common cold is a new discovery.

Another possibility is that this "flu" was actually a coronavirus pandemic. The finger has been pointed at a virus first isolated in the 1960s, though today it causes nothing more serious than a common cold. In fact, there are four coronaviruses responsible for an estimated 20 to 30 per cent of colds. Only recently have virologists begun to dig into these seemingly humdrum pathogens and what they have found suggests the viruses have a far more deadly past. Researchers now believe that all four of these viruses began to infect humans in the past few centuries and, when they did, they probably sparked pandemics.

I'll wager that such is the basis for some of the more vocal whackoes yelling that ALL coronaviruses evolve to 'just a cold'. We already know better with Covid-19. We only avoided Covid-β's scourge because Covid-δ and now Covid-ο took up the space.

This blasé attitude evaporated in 2002 when a new member of the coronavirus family began infecting humans. By the time the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was brought under control the following year, the SARS-CoV-1 virus had affected 26 countries and killed one in 10 of the 8000 plus people it infected. The fact that a coronavirus could be so deadly was a wake-up call. A sleepy backwater in the world of virology was suddenly in the spotlight.

Oops. And, by the way, other sources I've read have put share of coronavirus colds as high as 40%; not irrelevant.

[P]eople are less likely to be hospitalised with HKU1 and NL63 than with 229E and OC43, possibly indicating that the former pair have more ancient roots in human populations.

AKA, coronaviruses evolve to transmissibility over lethality and given more time more strongly so, just as Darwin would predict.