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Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

nature.com

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Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#151

Post by TMWNN »

corty wrote: post #146
lamontcg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe not even that, it could be a typical childhood ailment that you get once in your life and never again.

I suspect that, in retrospect, the first inclination of many parents when the pandemic began to hold "COVID parties" for children like the familiar "chicken pox parties"—inclination that wasn't followed, because of dire warnings about long-term health effects—was the right one.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#152

Post by mattnewton »

nickysielicki wrote: post #144
mattnewton wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have no idea why you've been downvoted, you made a really strong point. The only thing I can really say in response is that there's gotta be some sort of middle ground between the reaction we had and under-reacting.

I feel like that’s assuming that our reaction was over done. If anything, that we still had 500 thousand dead Americans seem to suggest we should have reacted harder, faster, and possibly differently.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#153

Post by maxerickson »

rayiner wrote: post #149
ryandrake wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except no country that wasn’t either an island or dictatorship managed to do that, not even Germany.

And how many actually tried?

Last spring the US was like "Hey, travel from Italy is all good, let's not worry about it" at the time when severe travel restrictions might have been effective.

I'll grant that people wouldn't put up with them for long, but reasonable measures employed before the infection base gets big can have an enormous impact on the total number of people that get infected.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#154

Post by nradov »

corty wrote: post #146
lamontcg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe not even that, it could be a typical childhood ailment that you get once in your life and never again.

Right there are at least four other endemic human coronaviruses, with HCoV-OC43 being very similar to SARS-CoV-2. Without a vaccine the safest option for most individuals is to catch it as a child. The resulting immunity isn't perfect but it usually protects most people from serious symptoms with later reinfections.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#155

Post by nradov »

corty wrote: post #137
cogman10 wrote: post #107

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…

So far there is no real experimental evidence that lower initial viral dose reduces the risk of developing disease symptoms. It's a plausible hypothesis but remains unproven.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#156

Post by nradov »

a-dub wrote: post #103
s_dev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>seems the answer is to genetically engineer a weak variant with a bigger reproduction and let it rip? A weaker varient of a disease often just is the vaccine. As for letting her rip? I'd imagine the concern is future mutations that the vaccine can't surpress with it bouncing between people.

yes but we are unable to vaccinate fast enough. virus is n^2, vaccine is n you cannot beat exponential growth with linear growth

If viral infections actually followed am exponential growth curve then we would be close to 100% infections by now. Obviously that hasn't happened. In reality infections generally follow a logistic curve, in which only the very early part approximates an exponential curve.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#157

Post by rhino369 »

maxerickson wrote: post #153
rayiner wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except no country that wasn’t either an island or dictatorship managed to do that, not even Germany.

And how many actually tried? Last spring the US was like "Hey, travel from Italy is all good, let's not worry about it" at the time when severe travel restrictions might have been effective. I'll grant that people wouldn't put up with them for long, but reasonable measures employed before the infection base gets big can have an enormous impact on the total number of people that get infected.

A lot of Europe tried.

It's really hard unless you can control borders. Even if the US locked down for 3 months and got to zero, it could be undone by one group of illegal immigrants crossing the border with COVID.

The US and EU were already pretty well infected before they realized what was happening. Only China, S. Korea, and Australia had major outbreaks that were contained, and even those, the outbreaks were fairly isolated (Wuhan, Shincheonji Church, Melbourne).

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#158

Post by maxerickson »

rhino369 wrote: post #157
maxerickson wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many actually tried? Last spring the US was like "Hey, travel from Italy is all good, let's not worry about it" at the time when severe travel restrictions might have been effective. I'll grant that people wouldn't put up with them for long, but reasonable measures employed before the infection base gets big can have an enormous impact on the total number of people that get infected.

A lot of Europe tried. It's really hard unless you can control borders. Even if the US locked down for 3 months and got to zero, it could be undone by one group of illegal immigrants crossing the border with COVID. The US and EU were already pretty well infected before they realized what was happening. Only China, S. Korea, and Australia had major outbreaks that were contained, and even those, the outbreaks were fair…

There is some threshold below which contact tracing and isolation work. A few dozen infected people crossing the border could be dealt with.

We've not bothered to do much support for isolation, have high case counts and a year of encouraging people to respond poorly to contact tracing, as if consenting to disease control measures is some unforgivable affront to autonomy.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#159

Post by rhino369 »

therealjumbo wrote: post #91
cogman10 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think facemasks are going to be the biggest change to daily life that I don't see going away. 2020 had a nearly non-existent flu season and that is likely related to all the COVID restrictions (I think facemasks being a key). If I were to guess, I think people wearing facemasks when they are sick (or even just through flu season) is going to be a lot more common and socially acceptable from now on. Hopefully that w…

How are masks 99% effective against the seasonal flu, but not nearly as effective against COVID-19?

They aren't 99% effective against the flu. They might not be effective at all for the flu.

Pre-covid studies were mixed as best, but many found that asymptomatic mask wearing wasn't significantly effective at reducing flu infections.

You are really only contagious with the flu for a day before symptoms show up (and even then you aren't that contagious until the symptoms get worse).

We'd eliminate the flu spreading by just self-quarantining after the onset of flu symptoms + wearing a mask when sick to go essential things like showing for essentials or going to the drug store.

I would have thought we learned something from the pandemic about staying home when sick. But when my wife's work found out she had covid symptoms it was STAY HOME. But the tests confirmed it wasn't covid--just a cold--COME IN. Now the whole office has a cold. They learned nothing.

Re: Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

#160

Post by jccooper »

a-dub wrote: post #103
s_dev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>seems the answer is to genetically engineer a weak variant with a bigger reproduction and let it rip? A weaker varient of a disease often just is the vaccine. As for letting her rip? I'd imagine the concern is future mutations that the vaccine can't surpress with it bouncing between people.

yes but we are unable to vaccinate fast enough. virus is n^2, vaccine is n you cannot beat exponential growth with linear growth

Sure, except that's it's already happened. The US currently has something like twice as many vaccinated as recorded infections, with vaccination growing at something like 5x the rate of infections.
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