elbows
Well-Known Member
I have always used the term novel virus as a result of the virus either being new to human understanding, or being new to our immune systems. Other interesting aspects of the virus, its effect on humans, its ability to confound some dull and narrow expectations didnt really come into the equation when deciding whether to use the term novel. If its a novel virus in terms of our immune systems then it has pandemic potential, and thats why I'd call it a novel virus.
Nor do I believe that the proportion of asymptomatic cases is actually unusual or unexpected. I am painfully aware that various experts and sides of the orthodoxy had other impressions, but from the word go I always considered that to be because of a bias against accepting very inconvenient truths that had massive implications for what sort of response would be required. But not all the experts downplayed the asymptomatic side of things initially, and I did not come up with my own novel ideas about this, I was just prepared to accept some early data and anecdotes and expert views whilst having a lower regard for others. And I picked an established side that seemed more likely to be in touch with reality and not so much in denial, and that were in tune with my pre-concieved notions that were developed long before this particular pandemic. This approach was not without its downsides, for example my beliefs about this side of things caused me to reject early WHO China report findings that there were very few asymptomatic cases in China. I was openly skeptical about that at the time, February 2020, and on that occasion I happened to make the right choice and looked like I knew what I was talking about, but it was a risk, I could have been completely wrong.
For some background to what I'm saying, just do a few random internet searches for things like proportion of asymptomatic cases with influenza. Whenever I've done that in the past, I end up with a very wide range of possible results, and all sorts of indicators that nowhere near enough research had been done to improve the quality of findings in this area.
It does get even more complicated when it comes to more specific issues such as how much transmission occurs in asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases. It is possible that SARS-Cov-2 is special and not typical in that regard. But its also possible people were just ignoring asymptomatic transmission of flu etc in the past. So there are some very definite limits to how much reasonably secure knowledge we had about these things prior to this pandemic. I'd say that at a minimum there were good reasons to expect to find a much more significant role than some wanted to assume was the case in the past, and that this pandemic certainly gave a much needed sense of urgency to research in this area. I cannot honestly say that anything discovered so far about how much of an issue this stuff is has actually been surprising to me at all.
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) how vaccines work, has been absolutely fascinating for me.
-- today's unsurprising 'big Festival' 
