HACKER Q&A
📣 galuggus

Is quarentine selecting for more deadly strains of COV19


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.

Could someone who knows what they are talking about answer this question?


  👤 buboard Accepted Answer ✓
The opposite. There is a hypothesis that, by quarantining everyone with symptoms, the milder asymptomatic versions are allowed to spread

👤 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.


👤 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.


👤 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.

👤 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".