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timr 15 hours ago

Please stop making this comparison. There's a clear reason why chickenpox can re-emerge as shingles later in life - herpesvirus maintains a circular chromosome within the nerve cells. It's a known feature of the virus family, and it's detectable [1].

There's absolutely no reason to believe that SARS-CoV2 has similar capability, and those who cling to this hypothesis are engaging in pseudoscience. Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5584196/

privatelypublic 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.

You might think that, but in the past two decades theres been so many "how did we miss that?" in so many fields. I'll let field experts bring specifics up- I only know popularized examples like Roman Concrete. And the ever-easy Mars unit-conversion error.

timr 15 hours ago | parent [-]

You can speculate if you like, but the claim you're advancing is fantastical to anyone who has studied virology, and requires an accordingly fantastic level of supporting evidence.

privatelypublic 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The only claim I'm making is "never underestimate humanity's ability to hold to an initial assessment/viewpoint/assumption."

Which has so many examples it's almost a truism.

Animats 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right, chickenpox has a very different aftereffect mechanism. I'm just arguing against the popular "when it's over, it's over" position.

pessimizer 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I assume, with this level of confidence, that we understand everything about Parkinson's now. It is a nerve disease so closely associated with influenza that there was speculation in the 60s that when the last child born during the Spanish Flu epidemic died, it would be completely eliminated as a common disease.

Shouldn't we just look for the ring that we learned how to detect herpes in nerves? Because every virus has to be constructed exactly like herpes in order to infect nerve cells, apparently.