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According to reports, the original BioNTech vaccine was developed in a matter of hours: https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-desi... Moderna's was done in two days.
Which makes me wonder why it takes so long this time?
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I decided to check Brazil really quickly and there's a very steep drop off once summer hit. I don't even need to bother with the UK.
The steep drop off starts of in July which in Brazil is winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_season#Timing -> https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/165/12/1434/125289
> In the Fourier analysis, the seasonality of influenza in Brazil was characterized by a semiannual pattern, peaking in the winter month of June (amplitude = 27 percent), with a second, smaller peak during the summer (January; amplitude = 13 percent; figure 2).
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> The first publicly confirmed death globally from Omicron was reported just yesterday With Omicron, not from Omicron. It's an important distinction.
The headline says "with" and the first bullet point says "from". The first paragraph says "the first publicly confirmed death globally from the swiftly spreading strain"
However I wasn't referring to the news article but actual statements from UK government ministers and health officials' failure to be specific when questioned. For all we know the person was hit by a bus.
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Yes, as long as it is out there, it means it can continue to mutate.
But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid.
The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population.
The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent.
Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them.
The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
We are at the endgame. These are the last things left to "end the pandemic", and they are all policy decisions: (1) allow peditricians and parents to decide if they want to vaccinate their under 5 year olds. (2) Stop banning Paxlovid (3) Stop any mandates, there just isn't the numbers to justify them. (4) Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public.
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Huh? I would suggest you read: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/steriliz... We don't actually have sterilizing vaccines for smallpox or polio either.
That article strikes me as largely playing a semantic game. From the article: >The classic tale of sterilizing immunity unfolds something like this: A pathogen attempts to infiltrate a body; antibodies, lurking in the vicinity thanks to vaccination or a previous infection, instantly zap it out of existence, so speedily that the microbe can’t even reproduce. No symptoms manifest, and most of the body’s immune cells ne…
Would someone who is flagging this comment please, instead, respond to it? If it is so trivially dismissed, please show the rest of us.
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You understand that what you said is pure nonsense right?
Based on? The second part seems logical tbh and the first part actually did happen ( 1200 employees and a decent company, so I doubt their would be lies. We're no better.com ). Also, it is similar enough to what i heard before from a conference about covid previous year.
It's actually a worldwide and European meeting ( so 2 times/ week for me actually) and it's a pretty good alternative for keeping company culture and bringing it somewhat online.
Yes, it's not required if you don't want to attend :)
I would imagine all viral contagions would eventually go that route. Because a virus cannot propagate if the host organism goes extinct, or for whatever reason the host organism is itself not fit for survival, or diminished in any way.... anything that might impact virus propagation.
I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...
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> The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all. Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening. In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential inc…
Natural immunity is the ONLY way back to a sane planet. It's time you take a step back, look at what happened for two years now, and realize we don't need this insanity anymore.
If the world had collectively done nothing about COVID over the past two years, sure, the pandemic might be "over" by now, but the total death toll would likely be much higher than what we'll probably end up with when all this is actually over, given our current path.
I'm not thrilled with how the past two years have gone, but it could have been much, much worse. It could also have been much better, if it weren't for people using the virus to score political points.
Even with a mix of vaccines and natural immunity, I don't think we can rely on natural immunity to solve this. That just doesn't pass the smell test.