Covid herd immunity is probably impossible • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#111

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

hdyideudxuedhb wrote: post #108

mschuster91 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main goal is to make it survivable, ie. akin to the flu, and not cause hospitals to get overrun like we have seen so many times around the world in the last year. There is a secondary main goal, one that the world should have learned after SARS v1, MERS, or the swine flu: get rid of the conditions that infectious agents need to spread . There's a reason that pandemic events have exploded over the last two decad…

You would have been a better health minister than any working for any government.

And I'm not even proposing anything new. Everything, literally everything I have written up has been known for many years, if not decades.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#112

Post by a-dub » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

reedjosh wrote: post #105

a-dub wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a last resort, it's true... but with variants mutating, i think we have to ask ourselves how much of a existential threat does this thing pose to the species. moreover, what's the difference if vaccines become mandatory anyhow? all the vaccines do is expose humans to the spike protein... if anything, hacking the virus seems safer than hacking the human body to produce the spike protein. i suppose it's hard to st…

> i think we have to ask ourselves how much of a existential threat does this thing pose to the species. I'd say not as great a threat as setting the dangerous precedent of experimenting on an unwitting populace.

under normal circumstances, sure. but iff this thing poses an existential threat, the ethics calculus changes.

i'd like to know if real virologists think that we're facing an existential threat.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#113

Post by LockAndLol » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #95

What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?

What is it that you propose? Have you informed yourself about the effects of your proposal and considered alternatives?

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#114

Post by subsubzero » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

It will be different this time!!(says the media) I like to base my findings on history and previous pandemics and how they were dealt with. The swine flu of 1918-1919[1] which was more deadly(IFR rate 2% [2]) than covid-19(IFR rate 1.15% [3]) did in fact go away, it was the last major pandemic the world has endured and once herd immunity is reached the virus will no longer have any "tinder" to burn through as either the vaccine or catching the virus to get antibodies will stop the virus in its tracks.

But what about mutations? coronaviruses mutate more slowly compared to the flu virus[4], and sequencing and testing is already underway for vaccines for the new variants[5].

Lastly the thing no one is really talking about is people die every year during flu season. The really old, the really sick etc, so I suspect that a good amount of deaths with covid are non-preventable and would have happened anyways due to the flu, which by the way is pretty much non-existent this year[6] [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio... [2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... [3] - https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201030/covid-19-infection-... [4] - https://rtmagazine.com/disorders-diseases/infectious-disease... [5] - https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/new-sars-cov-2-var... [6] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm#ILIActivityMap

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#115

Post by call_me_dana » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

“Herd immunity is only relevant if we have a transmission-blocking vaccine. If we don’t, then the only way to get herd immunity in the population is to give everyone the vaccine,” says Shweta Bansal, a mathematical biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

Does... Not... Compute. She is contradicting herself in the very next sentence.

Herd immunity is only possible with a transmission blocking vaccine. This makes sense, as once you’re vaccinated, you are unable to transmit the virus to someone else.

With that first statement, herd immunity is now not relevant, and therefore is not possible, so why mention it as a possibility?

It’s not possible, but we’re just going to vaccinate everyone anyways. Is she benefiting financially from this or something? I don’t understand.

Until we have transmission blocking vaccines, the concept of herd immunity is irrelevant. That goes not just for COVID-19, but for every other vaccination campaign as well. Large scale vaccination campaigns likely decrease transmission, but it doesn’t guarantee the end of any outbreak.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#116

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #60

heavyset_go wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it is so infectious, it will go through an entire herd or farm within days and eventually cause mutations and jump back to humans. So it will never go away and we need to prepare for it. This is also one of the main mechanisms for antibiotic resistance in bacteria that infect humans[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance#Food_...

Long-term, antibiotic resistance scares me more than covid.

COVID infections can give way to opportunistic bacterial pneumonia infections, which can have a 20% - 37% mortality rate[1]. Many pneumonia-causing strains of bacteria are antibiotic resistant[2], and being on a ventilator raises the risks of developing severe pneumonia[2]. Ventilator-associated pneumonia is more likely to be caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria[2].

[1] https://www.medscape.com/answers/300157-19086/what-are-the-a...

[2] https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resource...

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#117

Post by dennis_jeeves » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

e79 wrote: post #109

This is a lot less depressing when you consider that vaccines have shown astounding results so far at preventing disease. COVID is a lot less scary if you’re extremely unlikely to get very sick from it. This article touches on that a bit, but it’s buried until the end. There’s a lot of optimism to be had here, I think. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good — maybe we can’t eradicate COVID, but we can make it a l…

>This is a lot less depressing when you consider that vaccines have shown astounding results so far at preventing disease.

I'm less convinced by the common narrative. It appears that sanitation and nutrition played a key role in preventing diseases and co-coincided with wide spread vaccine use. Put another way vaccines did not work where sanitation + nutrition was abysmal.

(Cannot find references, because I came across them a long time back))

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#118

Post by rolph » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #25

cyptus wrote: post #15

even if we reach a herd immunity, won’t the virus just mutate in animals until it is effective against our vaccines?

Right now the vaccines are effective against current mutations but yes! It’s very likely that we’ll see more than one covid vaccine during our lifetimes as it mutates.

@OP [cyptus] this is a good question, there is no need for animal resivoir to establish variants/mutation as this happens concurrent with human infection as well.

@spivak you sound on track, the current thought in the lab is polyvalent vaccine. The problems include mRNA duplex interference, meaning 2 species of mRNA may anneal at complementary regions of the sequence to produce localized folding that derails the translation enzymes of the host.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#119

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

pandeiro wrote: post #77

heavyset_go wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or: make vaccinations mandatory if you want to protect those who cannot get a shot for health reasons. To put this one in perspective, we already make vaccinations mandatory for public school attendance, and colleges go one step further and require vaccinations for attendance, too.

Does COVID vaccination prevent infection and transmission?

[deleted]

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#120

Post by call_me_dana » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

corty wrote: post #38

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #2

I am truly baffled why the epidemiology community ever thought herd immunity will work. There is ample evidence that it is not a panacea. e.g. influenzae, hepatitis, meningitis, measles, mumps, rubella, yellow fever.

Well, the pox, diphteria and polio are gone or almost gone due to vaccinations, at one point or the other we had herd immunity with those. Its just that some small pockets of society refused to vaccinate and played incubators, so the rest of us wouldn't miss all the "fun"... Quite the same for all the other diseases you enumerated, just that we never managed to get herd immunity due to antivaxxers ruining it.

Or even worse than antivaxxers, the actual vaccinations being given in a mass rollout:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/9058847...

"It's actually an interesting conundrum. The very tool you are using for [polio] eradication is causing the problem"