As you say, blundering about from pillar to post, seemingly without taking any notice of the results of each separate experiment,
You would need to be in the operations room to know how feedback is being treated. From outside the planning room, it can look mysterious, I know, but believe me, they are war gaming each step. We cannot see, and they don't tell us, it is frustrating, but that is how these things are done.
The direction of the evolution is biased towards variants that spare the host,
Not always. There are examples from various diseases where they become more deadly.
An example here, almost nobody that dies of covid is still infectious at the time of death. That typically only lasts a week or so.
So as far as selection is concerned, it doesnt matter if they die AFTER the infectious period at all as its job done.
Selection will favour extending the infectious window. After that it means nothing.
1. The BBC lacks credibility on politicised issues like Covid or Global Warming.
2. As you say, we don't know. That's the point. Therefore "First do no harm" has even greater therapeutic utility than usual.
A reasonable hypothesis is that Lockdowns cause mutations to more severe forms by hindering the natural evolution to milder forms.
No, that is not a reasonable hypothesis, as it stands since dead hosts do not transmit the disease, only living ones, which milder forms encourage. Lockdowns may slow the evolution whatever the direction, but would not tip the evolution either way. The direction of the evolution is biased towards variants that spare the host, and against variants which kill the host. Splatt would argue that lockdowns bias the evolution towards more transmissible variants, but that is an independent property.
Actually it is a reasonable hypothesis: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/stresses-and-strains-the-evolution-of-covid-is-not-random
A reasonable hypothesis is that Lockdowns cause mutations to more severe forms by hindering the natural evolution to milder forms.
No, that is not a reasonable hypothesis, as it stands since dead hosts do not transmit the disease, only living ones, which milder forms encourage. Lockdowns may slow the evolution whatever the direction, but would not tip the evolution either way. The direction of the evolution is biased towards variants that spare the host, and against variants which kill the host. Splatt would argue that lockdowns bias the evolution towards more transmissible variants, but that is an independent property.
Actually it is a reasonable hypothesis: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/stresses-and-strains-the-evolution-of-covid-is-not-random
NO You are going to need to use your head here. A lot of cod have lost their wallops in the making of Matt's article. It's interesting to deconstruct his codswallop. He has even confused himself as well as you.
In all cases, the natural pressure is for the virus to evolve to a safer variant but Matt is chuffed to discover that humans can in some circumstances apply artificial selection to subvert the random process. That's correct.
The first section, recounts a tale of how attendants artificially selected for a more severe form of the Spanish flu. Matt then segues into the Pandemic in South Africa and recounts the same phenomenon. The first two sections are logically correct, but then comes the third section, and the switch!
In the third section Matt takes up to India, where the virus, is mild.Then he claims that mild variants have done well in India because lockdowns did not really get applied, that's completely incorrect and irrelevant.
The reason mild variants have done well in India is because they have fewer attendants to do artificial selection. It has nothing to do with lockdowns. Matt doesn't have the brains to know what he is saying.
So I'll say it for him: mild variants have done well in India since they have few attendants there to do artificial selection so the natural pressure on the virus to grow milder has prevailed. There is no pressure to make the virus stronger, through lockdown or anything else. You would need attendants to do it.
NB: If there is an attendant-borne evolution to greater virulence here it is because we have more attendants and hospitals, not because of lockdown!
To complete his bait and switch, now that we have lost sight of which cup the pea is under, Matt takes us on a pointless excursion to Manaus, where he says precisely nothing! But still manages to conclude with something completely wrong. Matt's mistake is to randomly say "Covid-19 differs from flu: it spares the young and clobbers the old" This is completely incorrect. Flu also spares the young and clobbers the old.
