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812many t1_j9cv2oa wrote

This sounds familiar, I wonder if it's a more official study published in Nature.

I heard about this on NPR a year or so ago about something similar in a guy in Boston, and they used some great metaphors to help us understand. Link to article similar to what I heard: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/02/05/964447070/where-did-the-coronavirus-variants-come-from

Basically, since the body couldn't fight off the coronavirus, it was allowed to multiply completely freely in this person's body. Then at a certain point, due to being in a kind of "survival of the fittest situation", it was began an evolutionary arms race with itself. Different strains would battle each other for supremacy, and over months the dominant version of the coronavirus would change. Since they were taking blood samples regularly, scientists were able to track this battle as it played out in real time.

One interesting thing that happened is that they could use the rapid evolution in this one guy to partially predict where evolution might take place with the circulating variants.

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barebackguy7 t1_j9dsw3n wrote

So did the guy feel awful the whole time this was happening?

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812many t1_j9dtvbw wrote

Well this particular guy in the article died. I’m not sure the one in the radio episode I heard lived, but having Covid and being immunocompromised doesn’t sound all that pleasant.

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Beautiful_Welcome_33 t1_j9ejtwy wrote

He was probably sedated and ventilated for the majority of it. 318 days of Covid isn't something you'll be up and about with.

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Educational_Hawk1236 t1_j9em61w wrote

This is why I don’t think it was a coincidence omicron emerged in an area of the world with a high rate of HIV infection, thus a lot of immunocompromised people.

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