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A (possible) solution to Covid-19

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Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#241

Post by tigershark »

tilolebo wrote: post #100
jbermudes wrote: post #12

I'm glad people are realizing that all this social distancing is merely a pause button on the virus. Once we press play on society, exponential growth will happen again and we will have effectively rolled back the clock until we reach herd immunity through things like the OP's suggestion. At least this next time we'll hopefully have more PPE.

It's not a pause button, it's a playback speed button that slows down the contamination. Remember #FlattenTheCurve. What is true is that it would take waaaay longer to reach herd immunity this way. Another thing that people usually get wrong is the her immunity concept: from what I understand, it doesn't mean we ALL need to be infected. We just need to be enough, so the virus can't spread anymore.

At that R0 herd immunity will be probably achieved when at least 70% of the population is infected. So it’s not all, but we are still speaking of about 5.5 billion people globally...

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#242

Post by danieltillett »

dongping wrote: post #220

I'm not qualified to assess the risk, but if the there's indeed ADE (antibody dependent enhancement),[1][2] people once infected with a milder strain may suffer from more severe symptom from the deadlier strains, thus killing more people in the end. I'm wondering how we may rule out this worst case scenario. [1] Is COVID-19 receiving ADE from other coronaviruses? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S128…

ADE is more a problem for the vaccine approaches. It is one reason we may never have a vaccine for this disease.

Hard to rule out worst case scenarios, we just have to work with what we have and make hard choices.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#243

Post by rmu09 »

FiberBundle wrote: post #229
rmu09 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is actually contrary to those other studies. The austrian study randomly selected among the whole population whereas the german study used a cluster connected to a hot-spot. IMO it is measures like social distancing in place for more than 3 weeks at the time of sample-taking in austria that reflect in the data.

It does. The german study was conducted in a town that was relatively heavily tested during its outbreak, and only recorded 2.5% official infections in the population of that town, so the german study showed the actual number to be 7 times as high. This Austrian study found this number to be only ~2.5 times as high. Germany and Austria overall seem to test fairly similarly.

The austrian number says currently active cases are probably 2.5 times as much as official numbers.

German study says in a community linked to an outbreak, there are 14% immune and 2% to be shedding viral DNA.

Austrian study didn't include antibody test (yet).

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#244

Post by oezi »

yoz-y wrote: post #131
foobarbecue wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herd immunity doesn't happen until you have a vaccine.

Or until something like 95% of population has been infected and we know for sure that those who already had the disease can not spread it anymore.

Statistically a disease reaches herd immunity if everyone except 1 / R0 are infected.

For a disease with R0 of 3 (such as covid) this would be 66%. To explain: If two out of three are immune then a disease which usually infects three people will run out of steam.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#245

Post by pedrocr »

londons_explore wrote: post #77
danieltillett wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. What we really want is a strain that has infected a whole lot of people and all of them have had a mild case.

You probably won't find that... You might find a strain where 99.9% of people get a mild case. Who is going to be the person to recommend deliberately spreading that strain to the world population, knowing that 0.1% of the world, 7 million people, will end up in a hospital and die? Sure, overall, fewer people might die, but the reality is whichever world leader makes that call has effectively just signed a death warr…

0.1% would be great. That's the mortality of the regular flu and we have ramped up the hospitals to cope already so the 0.1% severe cases would be better handled. That would be much better than we manage the flu. It would also make it actually possible to take risk groups and isolate only those for a longer time without crashing the economy. It would be the opposite of the flu where vaccination is focused on risk groups.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#246

Post by oezi »

p1mrx wrote: post #18

> it would be much better to just post a sample of the virus to everyone for example If COVID-19 is human malware, then this is a human software update.

At what probability of bricking during update would you stay on the old vulnerable version?

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#247

Post by danieltillett »

TuringNYC wrote: post #235

Dear @danieltillett - Thanks for the thoughtful piece. You noted on your post "live attenuated (oral) polio vaccine" but later wrote "Apart from the time it will take to develop, trial, and mass produce a vaccine (12-18 months), it is unlikely that any vaccine will be practicable." So how do you imagine this solution being administered if not as a vaccine? Is the solution a Pox Party ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…

A pox party would work. Given the strain will be infectious like the dangerous strains it is not going to be too hard to spread it around.

You can look at it from the other perspective - once identified it would be impossible to stop people spreading it around on their own. Let’s say one of you friends got infected with this “safe” strain you would quickly head over to their home for a cup of tea and a good chat.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#250

Post by jfoster »

dpratt71 wrote: post #201
weakstrain wrote: post #196

The author is thinking that reversing a deleted zone mutation is hard, but it could be that a simple mutation of the weak strain make it deadly, so my question is: can you guarantee that a new mutation is not going to make this strain deadly?, also the more people with the new strain of the virus, the more the bad mutation could happen. So I suggest looking for a strain for which we have a mean of killing the virus,…

There are no guarantees in life, but the reason we don't have global pandemics constantly is that mutations that make a virus as dangerous as SARS-Cov-2 are quite rare.

There actually has been quite a lot of pandemics over the past 100 or so years. Covid-19 has yet to eclipse at least 3 of them. (1918, 1957, 1968)
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