141–150 of 165 posts
What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?
It won't ever come back at full strength again.
We probably just get yearly shots for different strains at worst.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy, it takes less exposure to COVID to get you ill. Meaning, it's a more infectious disease. And masks aren't ineffective against COVID-19. Everyone wearing a mask does a pretty good job at preventing the spread of disease. However, there are a lot of people that aren't as strict about following mask rules and guidelines.
Also, masks don't filter all the viruses, they just reduce the amount you breathe in. Viral load is important, an infection will be less likely to lead to a disease if the viral load is low, e.g. because you are wearing a mask or keeping distance. If there is, in addition, a partial immunity, e.g. from a former flu infection, the threshold for the necessary viral load to cause a disease is even higher. Which is why m…
Will your immune system buildup up defences before the virus doubles to unstoppable overwhelming numbers. So a smaller starting initial number of the virus, gives the immune system a much longer time to organize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it certainly looks that way: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va... https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-pfizer...
Thanks for sharing those. While encouraging, the first obvious issue is that "reduce" != "prevent". There's also the related issue of how long that partial immunity lasts: I think the conventional wisdom is that it won't be for decades or anything, but would love to know if I'm wrong. Both of those factors make COVID vaccination quite different from, say, measles vaccination (~97% prevention, lifelong immunity), and…
As to the time the immunity lasts, that remains to be seen. Since it is brand-new, we will only know when new cases from previously-vaccinated people pop up. Maybe it'll be yearly, maybe a booster every 10 years, maybe lifelong. There is research showing that the antibodies from a corona infection last about half a year, but that is not the only factor that may provide immunity. And the yearly flu shot is because the flu virus mutates very rapidly, which corona doesn't as much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way forward requires coming to terms with the fact that none of this needed to happen in the first place. This disease is really just not that deadly for non-elderly and non-obese people, and we've known for a while. Every institution under the sun failed. We say we need to trust the science, but the scientists were all wrong: LANL put out a preprint paper that estimated r0 at ~7 near the beginning of the pandemi…
US deaths in 2020 jumped about 15% from 2019. Even if you think the pandemic response was a failure that somehow made it worse, you can’t also think that the crisis didn’t justify a strong reaction. That’s an enormous increase in mortality for a single year.
What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?
Maybe we could actually shut down next time rather than doing what we did: unenforced and ignored stay-at-home orders, unenforced and ignored business closures, and unenforced and ignored mask mandates. Do it right and then perhaps we could get rid of the disease in a shorter amount of time.
What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?
It'll come back looking more like seasonal influenza or the common cold. It won't ever come back at full strength again. We probably just get yearly shots for different strains at worst.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have had a hard strong lockdown in early 2020, but people like you made the arguments you're making now, and so we've had a see-saw year of restrictions being imposed and lifted, and here we are: the economy's fucked, huge numbers of people are dead, we have new variants[1] in circulation, and we're now saying "let's just kill off anyone who'd, or obese, or has diabetes, or asthma". [1] Notice how all the wo…
You don't know that. There are already plenty of examples of countries that have had hard lockdowns, no lockdowns and medium lockdowns, and the results are really inconclusive. The only pattern I can see is that the number of the infections is following the weather and the season, like flu viruses always do. "huge" numbers of people are not dead, look at excessive mortality, adjusted for population, compare 15 years…
However, the lowered restrictions during German summer also had a visible effect, look at the numbers between June 2020 and August 2020 and you will see a distinct rise there. It isn't nearly as bad as in September, but it is there.
First and foremost SARS-CoV-2 will never go away because it infects animals. 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. 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…
Rabies infects animals and it's been eliminated from large parts of the world. Vaccinating animals is sometimes an optoin. Not saying this is comparable, or that SARS-COV2 will be eliminated in a similar way. I think it's currently unclear what will be possible, but in the medium to long-term there are a lot of options to be explored. I wouldn't put elimination in the "impossible" bucket just yet.
What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?
Maybe we could actually shut down next time rather than doing what we did: unenforced and ignored stay-at-home orders, unenforced and ignored business closures, and unenforced and ignored mask mandates. Do it right and then perhaps we could get rid of the disease in a shorter amount of time.
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.
Diseases like the bubonic plague require a carrier such as fleas to infect humans in mass, while antibiotic resistance can be an issue with sanitary practices it’s far easier to contain bacterial pathogens than airborne viruses.