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The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#631

Post by h3cate »

gilbetron wrote: post #437
rayiner wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools. It really shouldn’t if you’re an educated person who is following what scientific authorities are saying. The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski... > At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control an…

So the CDC are not educated nor intelligent, I guess? "Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status." https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-... Also, the very study NYMag talks about still recommends: "Because universal and corr…

I'd love to see a teacher try and mandate correct use of masks on a bunch of 2 year olds :D

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#632

Post by criticaltinker »

baxtr wrote: post #607
beloch wrote: post #489

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earli…

I like your comment, but not this part: > The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic. I don't think that's possible, since I am not aware of a precedent. Meaning: the other 4 endemic coronaviruses which also started as pandemic and now are harmless cold viruses never caused a new deathly pandemic in a mu…

Documents from scientists in the UK government articulate in great detail that it is a "realistic" possibility that the virus mutates to be deadlier and/or more transmissive [1].

One key difference between this coronavirus and the other endemic 4 is that mass vaccination strategies were never used. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance is a realistic consequence if vaccines are used indiscriminately [2][3][4][5]. So that is one way we may be setting a new precedent here. If you take a look at what happened with Marek's disease virus in chickens, it's not pretty - none of us wants a world where it is literally impossible to survive without vaccination, because multiple generations of vaccines were undermined by viral evolution.

[1] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...

[2] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016...

[4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/

[5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#633

Post by h3cate »

pohl wrote: post #356
h3cate wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion but as countries get majority vaccinated they have to learn to not be as scared of it.

Even less popular opinion: fear is irrelevant. What we actually have is a cultural gap in how risk is assessed. Some only consider individual risk of death. Others also consider risk to beyond death, and beyond themselves. Casting the latter as afraid is unhelpful.

If you are a healthy person then you are low risk. If you are unhealthy (smoke, overweight, health condition) then you are at risk. I think a lot of people demanding the mandating of vaccines and mask wearing are in the smokers / overweight category and yet those people are never told to become healthy in themselves. People with health conditions have thought about illnesses long before covid. Thoughts?

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#634

Post by newbamboo »

da_chicken wrote: post #303
anonymouse008 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only people that need to be scared of it are the unvaccinated We often overlook those who were previously infected. I believe this is a common mistake that makes for inaccurate groupings, which negatively affect the common good.

Previous infection provides relatively short-lived natural immunity to COVID-19. I tested positive the last week of December 2020 (exactly three weeks before I was scheduled to get the vaccine, which I did also eventually get). When I spoke to the county health department, they said they had already seen repeat infections. They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months, which is backed…

Neither you nor the parent are paying attention to recent science. Natural immunity lasts longer than the current vaccines. And it’s likely the virus will escape the current vaccines over a long enough timeline. That’s not a problem if we can roll out new vaccines quickly enough to stay in front of new mutations. But that’s an if. This is the reason Fauci and others who understand the science are focusing on treatments.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#635

Post by h3cate »

zarzavat wrote: post #358
ajross wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: the unvaccinated are simply mistaken, and represent people's cousins and friends and children and grandparents, and their suffering and death would represent real loss and tragedy even to people who did everything right and got their shots. The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very un…

Your compassion is noble but the reality is that few share it. Very few vaccinated people are willing to accept restrictions on their liberty to help protect people who are unvaccinated by choice. Besides, the virus is not standing still. It is responding to selective pressure by becoming ever more transmissible. The more we try to control the virus by social distancing, the more the virus responds by becoming easier…

Do you think that there should be restrictions on society to protect people that are unvaccinated by choice?

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#636

Post by alex77456 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #36

Good article, but doesn't mention the other reason that covid-19 is never going completely away: animal reservoirs. We know that dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, white-tailed deer, a gorilla, and a tiger have been found to have been infected with covid-19. It is implausible that it will ever cease to have an animal reservoir, especially given the finding in Canada of 30% of white-tailed deer having it. Of dis…

It's not the society that we need to worry about. In the beginning a good chunk of society was ringing alarms to close borders, but the economy was too important to protect.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#637

Post by h3cate »

rajin444 wrote: post #614
ajross wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: the unvaccinated are simply mistaken, and represent people's cousins and friends and children and grandparents, and their suffering and death would represent real loss and tragedy even to people who did everything right and got their shots. The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very un…

> We're all in this together No, we aren't. Obesity is an epidemic. Nearly all of those people made a decision to make themselves more likely to contract covid, more likely to exhibit symptoms longer (thus spread it), and more likely to occupy critical healthcare infrastructure - as well as more likely to die from covid. There has been almost 0 acknowledgement of this as well as 0 promises to fix this issue. If you'r…

This is the most annoying point. One of the biggest factors in whether you will end up in hospital is obesity and smoking and yet for some reason this is never addressed.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#638

Post by dongping »

monkeynotes wrote: post #591
tialaramex wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works. Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case a…

My household has had zero cases per capita. Population count and relative isolation make a huge difference. You can't directly compare NZ with places like Germany or the US.

When we talk about population count, maybe China is a country worth mentioning here?

The success in New Zealand seems like the elephant in the room, that the Atlantic article failed to refer to. Not to mention China.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#639

Post by lisper »

xadhominemx wrote: post #511
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will always be sceptical of deviations from the status quo and politicians will always be there to capitalize on those fears for substantial gains of power. We have the most educated populis in human history and we're still seeing these problems. I'm not sure how you could fix vaccines becoming a political issue without major changes to the political structure.

Vaccine refusal has not become a major partisan political issue in any other country. It happened here because of the shameless cynicism of the Republican Party and aligned media apparatus.

That's not true. The same thing has happened in France and Brazil. Possibly other places too, I haven't really been keeping up.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#640

Post by at_a_remove »

thisiscorrect wrote: post #461
at_a_remove wrote: post #343

It will be interesting to see if this will mutate into less harmful variants, or, with vaccines go the way of Marek's disease, and become more lethal. This is a fascinating global experiment that will determine our policy for decades either way. Personally, the first thing I did when I heard that a vaccine was coming was try to find out if it was "leaky" or not. I could not find this information. We ought to be hustl…

Wasn't the lethality of Marek's disease for poultry driven by immune escape from vaccination?

It was the leakiness that drove it, from what I read.
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