The subvariant, known as XBB, accounted for about 52.6% of all cases in New England during the period of time between Dec. 18 and Dec. 24, according to CDC data. The week before, it accounted for about 34.3% of cases in the region, and just 20% earlier in December.
Source: New coronavirus subvariant, XBB, now widespread in New England
Another season, another CVOID variant.
Viruses do as viruses do: they frantically multiply in their hosts, playing a clever numbers game of poor duplication that inserts mutations, leading to an effective exploration of the possibility space of infection, growth, and transmission optimization. And, like any optimization, there are diverse drivers that push the result one way or another: the optimization effectively responds to whatever constraints that are put to it.
I am a visual person when it comes to optimization and the best way for me to visualize it is as a walk across the ‘possibility surface’ to find a minima where the optimization can ‘settle’ (see graphic, right).
I could digress about local and global minima, and add to the visualizations a ball bearing wandering the surface, or ‘adding energy’ to help the ball find a new minima (like those shaky ball-bearing-in-holes-games). I could also comment that the walk is from adjacency to adjacency, so the virus can’t necessarily do a wholesale change: changes in organisms are usually sequential, and if you’ve been following your CVOD mutations, they have been mostly sequential (tho watch out when two separate sequential branches infect the same host and mix and match whole stretches).
But I digress.
What I really want to talk about is a krazy notion as to how we could hack this virus.
How, the f-, Charlie, do you think this can happen?
OK, I’m am NOT suggesting we go for ‘herd immunity’.
If letting a virus run rampant to get herd immunity was a thing, then we would never had needed all the vaccines we actually use – mumps, rubella, measles, polio, smallpox, chickenpox, shingles, flu, plague (oh my gosh, plague*), and so many others. Science works. Letting viruses run rampant in the mistaken desire for herd immunity, as the millions who have died until the invention of those vaccines can attest, is not a useful strategy.
But, what we are seeing in a fascinating, in front of our very eyes, accelerated fashion with COVID is that when confronted by our isolation methods, sterile technique, masks, vaccines, and the like, the damned virus says ‘no worries, I’ll just hop over to where I am not constrained and carry on as usual.’
Indeed, that’s ALL we allow the virus to do: we have a set of things that constrain the virus, and it is very capable of finding where we are NOT constraining it.
As we gain immunity it evades it. As we try to contain the spread, it tweaks its virulence. As we make vaccines, it modifies itself.
But what if we engineered our response to fuck up that walk?
A wee story from an earlier pandemic
Despite the gripes from a certain set of gripers during this pandemic, we have so many changes to our behaviors from so many previous pandemics, such as SARS (masks), H1N1 Flu (Purel EVERYWHERE, cough-in-inner-elbow), and HIV (gloves EVERYWHERE, masks, changes in blood-handling).
For those who don’t remember, HIV used to be a death sentence (and it sorta still is). And at one point we had three really promising drugs in the pipeline to keep it at bay. But they all failed. Individually. At the same time.
But TOGETHER, they were THE shit – they each f-ed up the virus replication in different ways, three different ways that the virus could not mutate to respond to at one go, three different non-adjacent ways that the virus could not reach by walking from adjacency to adjacency, so it was not able to explore a way out in one go.
We hacked three simultaneous constraints that the virus just could not overcome through the means of the usual random walk thru possibility adjacencies.
So could we hack constraints on this virus?
I don’t know if we could do some triumvirate set of drugs that could stop this pandemic. Keep in mind HIV is still endemic in lots of places. It’s not necessarily a death sentence, but only now do we have vaccines and drugs to keep it from spreading (40 f-in years later).
Tho might we be able to engineer the virus to behave in a way we want it to behave, let the virus prosper, but with characteristics WE want it to have, say, no deaths or hospitalizations, mild to no symptoms, no negative outcomes?
Haha, that’s absolutely bonkers, of course. But this damn virus is really clever. How do we use its cleverness turn it into a ‘common’ cold that only gives you the sniffles and then skedaddles off?
What I am suggesting is a selective evolution of the virus at a population scale. Could we do a coordinated effort to nudge the virus in the direction WE want it to go rather that freaking out at each new variant the virus invents on its own in response to our CURRENT attempts to keep it at bay (which might never work**)?
Haha, leave that for some zany fiction story. The ethics alone have this as a an idea dead on arrival. And if just getting folks to get vaccinated and do simple safe behavior has been such a challenge, how would we ever be able to explain the science and goals of such a kracked science experiment?
Tho, I suppose, ahem, there might be some nation that has a ludicrously high level of control over it’s huge population and has a history of incubating respiratory viruses and releasing them upon the world. 🤔
Pft.
In any case, while perhaps bonkers ideas are unimplementable, might they inform something less bonkers?
Dunno. What do you think?
*Plague, plague, PLAGUE! Yersinia pestis! How many millions died over how many centuries? Herd immunity, my ass.
*Way to go China for f-ing top your response and being an amazing viral repository these past two years, as the rest of us try to move on, now re-releasing it on the world once again. What kinds of nasty new variants have you been incubating. What next in this pandemic will emerge from you?
