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!
Can someone explain? It basically self selects for survivability because living people spread better? And if so, how does the old strand die out in our world?
If it’s too severe the hosts take mitigation strategies which reduce the spread
Is the general consensus that the virus would be eradicated if everyone wore a mask? Is it enough?
This probably depends a lot on the quality of the masks and the whether people wear them properly or not. So far I'm not too optimistic about either.
It really doesn’t. Poor quality masks are questionable at an individual level but even if everybody just wore knickers on their head, that would have a gigantic effect on the spread on the virus overall.
> I'm not sure why no one's saying this, but the virus is adapting to masks Citation needed
On one hand, fair. One the other, when have we seen life not adapt?
Masks work by physically filtering viruses out of the air. How do you propose shall a virus adapt to that? The thing's packed with DNA, it can't easily evolve to be 1/10th the diameter (and 1/1000th the volume) to get through filters.
If we had invested more in developing vaccines and treatments for the common cold, then maybe we would have tricks that would have helped us beat covid faster.
I think that's a common misconception here. Common cold viruses are very frequent targets of research - not with the end goal of creating an actual vaccine for a specific cold virus but for covering blind spots in our insight and processes that can be weaponized to create a vaccine when an outbreak happens. I'd say that our system is working - developing several working vaccines for a novel virus in under a year is p…
Especially considering several of the actual vaccine candidates were developed in low single digit months, it's the evaluation production and testing that's taking most of the time.
Why stop fighting when it becomes just a cold? The common cold costs billions (not to mention making people miserable).
I wonder why we never hear serious talk of trying to cure the common cold. It reminds me of how people who talk about curing aging are seen as crackpots. Unlike cancer, aging and colds are seen as inevitable by people, and any attempt to cure them, or even talk about the fact that we should, is seen as fanciful.
Can't remember where I read it, but the idea was that using existing vaccine tech to knock out pretty much any virus is a major financial undertaking. Now multiply that by 100x, or however many common-cold-causing viruses exist.
Keyword being existing. Future advances may change the landscape significantly, and not just for colds. For that, we need a stable society, competent governance, and investment in foundational science.
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…
Not sure of today, but as recent as 2011 it was. I don't think a lot has changed there. Wonder why your comment was down-voted.
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…
> A major shift in thinking and priorites has to happen globally, on many different fronts to make humans less vulnerable to this kind of disease in the long-run.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I don't think the current mitigations can reasonably be long-term solutions. Think about how the lockdowns have caused small businesses to close down, people to lose their jobs, etc. We count deaths caused by COVID-19, but do we count the deaths and quantify the damage caused by our mitigation strategies?
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.
"cases of flu are remarkably low this year because of all the mask wearing, social distancing &c." And yet if COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu you'd expect to see equal result form those mask wearing and social distancing measures.. but you don't. COVID-19 is just way more deadly.
COVID-19 is just way more deadly than the typical flu might be true, but it is telling not much more than claiming COVID-19 is way more deadly than the common cold.
Less than 217000 people died of COVID-19 during the epidemic in the USA while some 1.5 million people died from other causes in the same time frame. Why the obsession with COVID-19?
This probably depends a lot on the quality of the masks and the whether people wear them properly or not. So far I'm not too optimistic about either.
It really doesn’t. Poor quality masks are questionable at an individual level but even if everybody just wore knickers on their head, that would have a gigantic effect on the spread on the virus overall.
That would be great if true, we'd be able to scale down the social distancing, among other things. That said I'm not nearly as confident that the effect will be that great, do you have any references you're basing this on?
If we had invested more in developing vaccines and treatments for the common cold, then maybe we would have tricks that would have helped us beat covid faster.
I think that's a common misconception here. Common cold viruses are very frequent targets of research - not with the end goal of creating an actual vaccine for a specific cold virus but for covering blind spots in our insight and processes that can be weaponized to create a vaccine when an outbreak happens. I'd say that our system is working - developing several working vaccines for a novel virus in under a year is p…
I'm not aware of a single working Covid-19 vaccine, which ones would that be? There are promising candidates, sure, but I don't think any have already been shown to be both effective and safe, which I'd say is required for one to be working, on the timescales that are needed, and I wouldn't know how one might do that so quickly. The current forerunners might well not work out, though I hope at least one of them will work, but my understanding is that anything immunity-related is fiendishly hard.