
Ask HN: Is quarentine selecting for more deadly strains of COV19 - galuggus
Is quarentine selecting for more deadly strains of the virus? It seems the people leaving quarentine(to go to hospital) are those with deadly symptoms whereas milder cases stay at home.<p>Could someone who knows what they are talking about answer this question?
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buboard
The opposite. There is a hypothesis that, by quarantining everyone with
symptoms, the milder asymptomatic versions are allowed to spread

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jklein11
Not sure where you are but in New Jersey everything in the state is shut down,
not just to people with COVID symptoms

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jklein11
This is a really interesting question that I don't pretend to be an expert on.

It probably comes down to what causes the difference in reaction to the
infection. It could be that there are differences in people's immune systems
that cause them to have a much more severe reaction. In this case the
quarantining wouldn't have an effect.

If people who are having a much more severe reaction are getting a strain of
the virus that has mutated to cause these more intense symptoms then you would
see the issue you are talking about.

My uneducated guess is that it is the former, but I'm really not sure.

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Fragoel2
The opposite.

From the evolutionary point of view, a virus has no interest in being deadly:
if it kills its host, it can't reproduce itself.

When social distancing (quarantine and lockdown) is enacted, it is harder for
a deadly strain of the virus to reproduce and hence survive, as we react to it
by putting into place stricter countermeasures. Which strains will thrive? The
ones that able to "sneak around" unnoticed, by causing only mild symtomps.

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admiral33
I hear this a lot, but isn't evolution trial/error? Just because we can say
it's not in an organism's evolutionary interest to evolve a certain way,
doesn't mean it won't "try" it - at any stage in it's evolution. Also I don't
think an organism has any active role in deciding what mutations occur,
regardless of it's interest.

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phillipseamore
Are you perhaps misunderstanding something? Everybody with confirmed symptoms
should be in quarantine, which you do from home unless you are so sick as to
need hospital care.

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galuggus
Perhaps the more deadly strains are infecting people in hospitals (health care
workers and other staff and patients)

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rossdavidh
Best way to test that would be to use different countries' death totals over
time, and compare that to differences in quarantine policy.

By the way, you misspelled "quarantine".

