Starting with Cal-Louise?

:joker:

All that wasted bacon :(

Kill them all..and bats

...I recall watching a great documentary with a scientist at the start of Coronatime...how we the human race have been pushing animals/wildlife out of its natural habitat for many, many years and into more urban areas ...living alongside humans, as it were....and that will mean that animal to human viruses will be more and more prevalent in the future...

I think it's fairly likely that in maybe 100-years-or-so (assuming we make it that far) they'll have cracked virology and it won't be that much of an issue any more. "Oh you've got a little bit of Ebola, take one of these three times a day for a week."

Hey...fancy another one?

:joker:

:joker:

...hmmmmm, I agree to a degree that some will become more commonplace diseases...but I think that the sophistication and complication of them will increase hugely as well ...so maybe it’ll be more that in 100 years time...(..assuming we make it that far...)...regular quarantine times of year become a repeated part of human life...

Why do you think that though? Though it may seem like it because of the extreme coverage of "confused scientists" we get these days... new viruses are not any more complex or sophisticated than those that have been doing the rounds for hundreds of years. They're just... new.

Anyway to elaborate more - I think there will be advances in anti-viral medications, or perhaps even better in nanotech/synthetic immune systems that mean it won't matter what the virus is, there'll just be a quick and effective "anti-viral procedure" that knocks it on the head. Similar to the huge leap in human health that occured with the development of antibiotics.

They're actually very close to developing working antibiotic nanotech. Which is a good thing because conventional antibiotic resistance is a very real thing and if not solved, within the next 30 years will be producing annual global death rates that make Covid-19 look like a day at the beach :umm2:. The looming catastrophies that everyone has been ignoring for decades, eh :laugh:

All virus's mutate over time and the mutation is always progressively less damaging to the host. The mutation that propagates the most is the one that causes the host the least harm, it's simple science. In 20 years time covid 19 will just be another variant of the common cold

ALMOST always, it's true that the virus will tend to evolve towards survivability - which means being able to live in the host for as long as possible without being defeated by the immune system or killing the host (the "perfect virus" is symptomless). Of course, random mutations could always make things worse either "by accident" or by the mutation increasing transmissibility whilst leaving effects the same.

But yes in general viruses become less severe as they adapt to the physiology of the host species.

That's why we keep getting them from animals; these viruses are active in animals with no symptoms at all, but they will at some point in the past have been "new" to the bats/pigs/birds etc. and will have had symptoms and killed a number of them.

That depends entirely on how widespread it becomes over the next couple of years. If we do successfully suppress it, it'll stick around in roughly the same form (like SARS, Ebola, etc.) because to adapt it needs to propagate.

...I guess I just think that as vaccines will get more complicated and sophisticated then so will viruses...like a battle..?...and nature/the environment will always be one step ahead of our scientists...