When Viruses Become More Virulent

The evolution of virulence depends on the biology and interplay of infection and transmission, writes Joel O. Wertheim, PhD, associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine, in the journal Science.

Virulence is the degree to which a pathogen weakens, sickens or kills its host. More virulent pathogens may be less transmissible because in killing its host, it reduces the opportunity for transmission. But both virulence and transmissibility are forever linked: To maintain or increase infectiousness, a pathogen must be virulent.

In his Science article, Wertheim describes the emergence of a more virulent and transmissible variant of HIV that has spread to 102 known cases, mostly in the Netherlands. These findings, he says, have relevance to SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s possible that the coronavirus is evolving toward a more benign, highly transmissible infection, similar to common cold viruses, but that outcome is not guaranteed.

SARS-CoV-2 has displayed an extraordinary ability to rapidly alter its transmissibility and virulence, and how those two factors interact over the coming months will dictate whether SARS-CoV-2 will benignly fade away or continue to be an evolving, global public health threat.

– Scott LaFee

"You chose to have a kid"

A key point in framing is that almost every anti-choice idiot says, is that they always frame it as "the choice to have a kid". Specifically, in this case:

"You chose to have sex, so you have to deal with the kid"

Let's just...side-step the puritanical root of punishing people for having sex, and the actual, sincere belief that humans Not Having Sex is something we can actually achieve, which is stupid.

People explicitly make choices to not have kids when they have sex, too.

There are whole swaths of things that men and women do, hopefully overlapping, to not have kids.

None of them are 100% effective. Even Female and Male sterilization aren't 100% effective, other than a full blown hysterectomy.

Literally, a man and a woman can both go to a doctor, have actual surgeries performed so they don't have kids, have sex with one another, and still wind up pregnant. Especially if it's in the first few years after their surgeries are performed. Surgeries which have weeks to months of recovery time, planning, and costing thousands of dollars each.

I choose to go to work every day; punishing me for getting hit by a cab as a "potential outcome" of going to work is fucking ludicrous. People smoking are more likely to get a cancer, but we still treat them in hospitals. Getting AIDS from donating blood is a thing that can happen, but you're damn well going to sue the hospital or agency that gave you AIDS. I can play the lottery every day and eventually win a million dollars, but it's still "the stupid tax" and actually thinking it will happen is the literal Gold Standard for "not gonna happen".

Nowhere else in society do we accept bullshit like that except when we're talking about controlling women and their sex lives for doing things you don't want them to. And it's always, always from the same people who want the woman to deliver the baby (which itself has a high risk of just killing the mom outright, especially in the US) who don't want to feed the baby when it's delivered, who don't want to give it a home or clothes or healthcare.

Again, that's before we even get to: