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

Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#661

Post by triangleman »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #114
strombofulous wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, aren't future events supposed to be already considered in the stock price? It's not like a vaccine was unpredictable

Yeah, but investors seem to want to hold on to stocks for as long as possible (dividends? I don't know how that works, as far as I know holding stock for dividends is nowhere near as profitable as speculating)

Reuters calculated [1] that the average holding period for stocks is down to 5.5 months recently. See the chart on that page, it has been as high as 8 years in the past.

Because of day traders and HFT, it's hard to say how long your average investor holds a stock, but it's fair to say that some hold it for a long time and others "speculate" most of the time. The speculators probably have a greater impact on the movement of a stock, but over time it must move in line with the performance of the company.

The price of a stock is thought to be a "risk adjusted present value" of the underlying company. Even if you could be 100% sure a company would make X dollars per year in perpetuity, the price would not be infinite. Instead each year of earnings is "discounted" by risk, inflation rate, the cost of borrowing money, the value of competing investments, and other factors.

If it was assumed by investors that Zoom would make lots of money for the next 5 years, and then make very little money, and this news meant they would only make lots of money for the next 3 years, then that will have an impact of 2 years worth of discounted earnings immediately.

(of course it's not like Zoom pays or is planning to pay a dividends but there's still an underlying value, for instance they could be purchased by a larger company that does pay dividends.)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-short-...

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#662

Post by copperx »

lbeltrame wrote: post #271
jakozaur wrote: post #214

Good: + ~90% of individuals achieve immunity. + no significant side-effects. Not so good: - two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout. - -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries. I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?

The latest data (preprint, not peer reviewed etc etc) mention memory B and T cells up to 8 months after recovery from the illness. This means that an immunity of one year is probably likely. This would be probably enough to quench the spread, but not to eradicate the virus.

Just to clarify, what you're saying is with respect to an actual infection, and not the vaccine, right?

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#664

Post by coryfklein »

andrepd wrote: post #155
TomGullen wrote: post #2

Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end!

The markets? Spare me. What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations? They are neither wise nor competent, why should every news story be suffixed by how "the markets" (swt) react?

Are you suggesting that the signal of the markets today has zero corellation with the promise of this vaccine? That seems like quite the position to take.

Or are you lamenting that much attention is given to something that is primarily driven by wealthy organizations? I guess I might sympathize with you there.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#665

Post by spullara »

Certhas wrote: post #658
gizmo wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…

> Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. I am not sure this is true. At least some articles I read attribute the successes in many Asian countries to aggressive contact tracing and quarantining. You don't ask people kindly to self-isolate, you move them to hotels and quarantine them. You don't ask them to remember their contacts, you aggressively investigate them using every source of data available. I thi…

Asia results are from strict compliance to protocols across the population.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#666

Post by coryfklein »

fuoqi wrote: post #171
andrepd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust. Russia and China lie through their teeth on everything and anything. It's irrelevant whether or not they are lying in this particular instance: they cannot be trusted.

As if "the West" and the US in particular don't lie left and right if it helps to promote their agenda. It's a simple matter of who aligns with whom.

The difference is that placing trust in China/Russia means trusting in a narrative driven by a small group (the ruling elite), while placing trust in "the West" usually refers to the collective knowledge of scientific endeavours that tend to succeed better in a nation more friendly to liberal democracy.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#668

Post by j2bax »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #574
mquirion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 2-dose regimen, needs to be stored at -70C, and Pfizer already said they'll only have 1.5B doses over the course of the next year. It's going to be a very slow roll out.

Why aren’t we using _all_ the factories to make as many doses as possible? There should not be “companies” making these to their capacity. This should be a public effort

I would guess that a lot of the factories that are capable of producing these type vaccines also produce a lot of other important drugs and vaccines that we can't just put on the back-shelf without even greater harm.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#669

Post by m4rtink »

remote_phone wrote: post #391
bufferoverflow wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person. But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own. The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as…

It can’t die out on its own. Animals are getting infected by it, meaning it will be around forever. But as long as we can tolerate it, that’s all that matters.

IIRC there have been infections that had animal reservoirs and still were eradicated.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#670

Post by bbojan »

gizmo wrote: post #372
bufferoverflow wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person. But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own. The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as…

Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…

Contract tracing has worked at scale at South Korea for example.
Post reply on HN