Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

science.sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 106 posts

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#31

Post by guscost »

rich_sasha wrote: post #11

If it does become endemic, the question is, what disease would it cause? The deadly Spanish and Hong Kong flu viruses didn't disappear, but rather evolved to cause yet-another seasonal flu after a few seasons. If the Covid virus does the same and causes yet-another-cold, who cares? Whereas if we're fighting Covid-the-disease for decades to come, well, God help us!

There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that as it becomes endemic, it will evolve toward yet-another-cold. There is no evidence in all of history for an endemic coronavirus that is not yet-another-cold.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4361674/#!po=0....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873896/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC136581/

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#32

Post by orangecat »

dehrmann wrote: post #17
mns wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t just put all the “many” people in the same bucket. I hate this so much now in various circles. I also saw someone else with a similar idea: “why is there a second wave, are so many people anti maskers and non COVID believers?”. No, people had enough of the fumbling and incoherent messages, people are tired and the world is made up not just of developers that can work from home and see this pandemic from the…

There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.

Right, especially with the huge variability by age. Telling 25 year olds that they shouldn't socialize because they might infect someone who might infect someone who might infect someone who might infect a nursing home is nowhere near as persuasive as "if you get infected there's a significant chance it will kill you".

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#33

Post by ls612 »

dehrmann wrote: post #17
mns wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t just put all the “many” people in the same bucket. I hate this so much now in various circles. I also saw someone else with a similar idea: “why is there a second wave, are so many people anti maskers and non COVID believers?”. No, people had enough of the fumbling and incoherent messages, people are tired and the world is made up not just of developers that can work from home and see this pandemic from the…

There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.

Rough order of magnitude estimates suggest that corona will kill ten or so times as many people as a typical flu season by the spring of 2021. We have however spent hundreds of times as much on coronavirus mitigation than we ever did on flu mitigation in one year. This would imply that society places well over ten times the value on a life lost to covid than on a life lost to influenza.

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#34

Post by mytailorisrich »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #4

Of course, no way to control coordinated mask wearing for 7 billion people simultaneously without decades of planning. HIV has killed around 50 million over the past 40 years, and we know how to stop that but it is still endemic and will be for at least a century.

I believe that HIV is still considered an epidemic, and in fact a pandemic, which is not the same as being endemic.

Edit: This comment is being downvoted for some mysterious reason so I'll add a reference: "HIV/AIDS is considered by some authors a global pandemic. However, the WHO currently uses the term 'global epidemic' to describe HIV." [1]. There may some confusion as to what 'endemic' means by some commenters here...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#35

Post by Cactus2018 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #11

If it does become endemic, the question is, what disease would it cause? The deadly Spanish and Hong Kong flu viruses didn't disappear, but rather evolved to cause yet-another seasonal flu after a few seasons. If the Covid virus does the same and causes yet-another-cold, who cares? Whereas if we're fighting Covid-the-disease for decades to come, well, God help us!

Of the ~200 common colds, 4 are known coronaviruses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Viruses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Infection_in_human...

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#36

Post by HarryHirsch »

pmoriarty wrote: post #29
dehrmann wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.

"while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier" From just a week ago: "Covid deaths three times higher than flu and pneumonia" [1] And that's taking in to account all the lockdown, mask-wearing, and social distancing measures. Without those it'd be even worse. [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54463511

There's also the issue that cases of flu are remarkably low this year because of all the mask wearing, social distancing &c. Comparing apples to apples, coronaplague is about 10 times as deadly as annual flu.

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#37

Post by pmoriarty »

mns wrote: post #14
pmoriarty wrote: post #8

With so many people ignorant of the science, believing in wild conspiracy theories, being antivaxers and antimakers, of course it's going to become endemic. It remains to be seen if most people will even get vaccinated if/when a safe and effective vaccine becomes available. Even if people got vaccinated once, to actually eradicate COVID-19 they might have to get revaccinated multiple times, possibly over a span of ye…

You can’t just put all the “many” people in the same bucket. I hate this so much now in various circles. I also saw someone else with a similar idea: “why is there a second wave, are so many people anti maskers and non COVID believers?”. No, people had enough of the fumbling and incoherent messages, people are tired and the world is made up not just of developers that can work from home and see this pandemic from the…

"Instead of acting with compassion and trying to convince people of the dangers of this disease"

Like that hasn't been done non-stop since the world heard the term "coronavirus"?

A significant percentage of the population prefer not to listen to the science and instead believe in conspiracy theories. Science literacy in the general population is abysmal. That's just a fact.

Many people prefer to listen to what their morning talk show tells them than listen to the CDC.

This kind of ignorance could be overcome to some extent through massive information campaigns, but so far the US government at least is incapable or unwilling to do that. If anything, on some of the highest levels it's doing quite the opposite.

That kind of obviously harmful attitude is not just ignorant, it's borderline malicious.

People certainly have and will probably continue to die because of it.

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#38

Post by m3kw9 »

With the common cold and flu they mutate a lot more than Covid, the chance is that it will be around for a long period of time then fizzle off because of the advance of meds together with low rate significant of mutations.

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#39

Post by evan_ »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #23
Skunkleton wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you also can't transmit HIV just by being in the same room.

I reckon it's harder to get people to always practice safe sex than it is to wear masks.

people are having sex a lot less frequently than they are breathing air, though

Re: Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?

#40

Post by stuzenz »

dehrmann wrote: post #17
mns wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t just put all the “many” people in the same bucket. I hate this so much now in various circles. I also saw someone else with a similar idea: “why is there a second wave, are so many people anti maskers and non COVID believers?”. No, people had enough of the fumbling and incoherent messages, people are tired and the world is made up not just of developers that can work from home and see this pandemic from the…

There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.

I thought that was the case too for a while.

I felt this was a really interesting piece explaining how covid deaths are reported deaths versus flu deaths are just estimated and how the two are very different numbers to base comparisons off.

I also kind of liked how the article was written with the narrative of the eureka moment in realising how the stats were not comparable.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

> I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

> The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

Post reply on HN