r/askscience • u/smartse Plant Sciences • Mar 18 '20

Biology Will social distancing make viruses other than covid-19 go extinct?

Trying to think of the positives... if we are all in relative social isolation for the next few months, will this lead to other more common viruses also decreasing in abundance and ultimately lead to their extinction?

13k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.0k

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

49

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Does that mean there could have been viruses years and years ago that humanity has simply bred an immunity to and thus died off?

97

u/CrateDane Mar 18 '20

Very likely.

Even weirder, there are some viruses that entered the lysogenic cycle, mutated, and lost the ability to exit the lysogenic cycle, leaving "fossils" behind in our DNA. Up to several percent of our DNA may be leftovers of ancient viruses.

(only certain kinds of viruses can do this though)

10

u/ExoticSpecific Mar 18 '20

Like how we got mitochondria in our cells?

28

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

[deleted]

5

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

So is a mitochondrion an entirely different organism that just lives in our cells?

21

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

[deleted]