The title kind of makes it sound like "As far as we can tell, the virus has no genes," but the actual discovery here is that the virus doesn't share any genes with any other viruses that we know of. Which is still weird, but far less mysterious than it sounded.
this is an amoeba virus. most viruses do not harm humans. harming or killing your host is generally a bad evolutionary strategy so viruses that do this are relatively rare enough that unless a piece of writing explicitly identifies specific harm to humans, you can assume it most likely isn’t harmful and never will be.
> this is an amoeba virus. most viruses do not harm humans. harming or killing your host is generally a bad evolutionary strategy so viruses that do this are relatively rare enough that unless a piece of writing explicitly identifies specific harm to humans, you can assume it most likely isn’t harmful and never will be.
and I can also say with the exact same near certainty this virus isn't dangerous to humans.
You can prove me wrong by showing only one human getting sick from the virus.
However, there's no way to prove it is not dangerous to any humans. there's no possible proof for that, same as there's no possible proof that there's no invisible pink unicorn. I can say nobody has gotten sick from this virus, so far, but that doesn't preclude the possibility of one of the 7 billion humans on the planet possibly having a weirdly specific allergy to this particular virus, nor that it isn't possible for a human to be born with a mutation that makes them vulnerable to this virus. Goal posts can always shift further and further away. and same as the pink unicorn, I don't need to take the concern seriously. Both are unfalsifiable claims. in the strictest logical sense, they're not false. but there's no way to prove they are false either, so worrying about a potentially dangerous virus is just as reasonable as worrying about dangerous invisible pink unicorns, menacing orbital teapots, flying spaghetti monsters or the vengeful diety of your choice. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if we ran in a panic at every unfalsifiable claim, nobody would ever leave their beds.
Sure, I am aware of the lack of existence of no black swan proofs, I am simply pointing out the outbreak coverage seems more comparable to say the ebola outbreak than coverage the virality and fatality should imply, ie that of a seasonal flu.
you literally did not do that.
If you need to explain that you were being ironic on the internet, you might need to consider the possibility that you are bad at it and you shouldn't do it. And if you're making a comparison between this random virus and coronavirus, that's still a terrible and bad argument. If you don't like sensational news stories get off whatever platform is promoting them.
You can't prove a negative. But since taking a basic biology class in highschool 25 years ago, I haven't heard of any radical new discoveries in virology that would indicate viruses becoming more harmful than 99.9% benign. Highschool biology is definitely not the end all be all. If you find anything, it might make a cool thing to post on hacker news.
