As I understand it, COVID-19 belongs to the same family of viruses as the common cold.
Every year we get new flu vaccines, but because the flu mutates so fast the vaccines are based on what the experts think the flu will look like by the time the vaccine’s ready. Sometimes, those predictions are very good, and the vaccine provides good protection. Other times, those predictions are wrong and you end up with a flu vaccine that doesn’t provide much protection.
However, even a bad flu vaccine is better than no flu vaccine. Because the vaccine primes your immune system to fight one type of flu, if you get another type of flu that looks similar, your body can respond to it quicker.
Is the same principle true with the new Coronavirus? If you’ve had a bad cold caused by a virus from the same family as COVID-19, would that in any way prepare you for COVID-19 itself?
Starting with these wikipedia pages, you can see that the viruses are taxonomically distinct. They’ve been grouped each into a different phylum. That makes them as distinct from each other as animals, plants and fungus. That actually threw me, I wasn’t expecting that much. But the viruses are very different from each other in structure.
When they attack human upper respiratory passages, and damage tissue there, pretty much the first response of the human respiratory system is to increase fluid, and try to cough that excess fluid out, but that’s not so much an immune response, as it is the task of a closed box of sticky fluid trying to empty itself.
“the common cold” is actually caused by several families of virus, only one of which is family coronaviridae, which is comprised of several genera and species of virus. The majority of viruses that cause “the common cold” are in the order picornaviridae, more specifically in the genre Enterovirus the three species of rhinoviruses, which come in over 150 different serotypes which is how they keep dodging your immune system. Other families of viruses also cause “the common cold” which is, as you might have surmised by this time, not one disease but many all with very similar symptoms. A couple hundred or more species of virus can cause the common cold.
Apparently not - but it’s far too early in this outbreak to be absolutely certain of that statement.
Ok, that in no way makes sense. Sorry, my morning coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. And I’d strikethrough if I could. But that never works for me here on the SDMB, even if I make the edit window,
Examples of different phyla would be earthworms(Annelida) vs insects(Arthropoda) vs mammals(Vertebrate a sub-phylum of chordata.)
Covid-19 and the very much more common cold-causing rhinoviruses are in different orders. People are in the Order Primates. Horses/zebras/donkeys are in the order Perissodactyla. So the covid-19 virus and the rhinovirus are at least as different as people and horses are different from each other.
Just to further elaborate, within the order Perissodactyla you not only have horses/zebras/donkeys but ALSO hippos and tapirs… so Covid-19 is at least as different from rhinoviruses as people are from not just horses but also hippoes and tapirs.
There are something like a half dozen different ORDERS of viruses causing “the common cold” and also “influenza like illness” (including, yes, actual influenza viruses). Which together are a grouping as large and diverse as something like “mammal”.
Again - very much simplified because I don’t have the time this morning to get more elaborate. Also, meant to serve as an introduction to those new to all this.
Every year the new flu vaccine is a mixture containing vaccines to a number of recent flu viruses that experts think might be common in the new year. Even a flu vaccine that doesn’t include what turns out to be the most common or most dangerous flu of the new season still includes vaccines for the other recent strains, and provides protection against them.
A bad flu vaccine is worse than no vaccination, because it stimulates the immune system the same way that a flu virus does. A bad flu vaccine can make you very sick, the way the flu virus does. Even if it does provide good protection, and particularly if it doesn’t provide good protection, or if it turns out that there just isn’t very much flu around that year, a bad flu vaccine is just a bad vaccine.
And generally, no :). Either flu viruses are similar enough so that they are “the same”, or they aren’t. You don’t respond quicker to different flu viruses.
I just listened to a “The Daily” podcast that said small children were unlikely to contract this virus because they were exposed to so many cold viruses in school.
Apart from being medically just seriously wrong, it doesn’t make sense. By this logic adults should not be susceptible because they also caught all manner of crap when they were kids (with due acknowledgement of Melbourne’s point about antigenic drift and mutation within viruses).
I didn’t say that you could get flu from a flu shot. But it’s hard to complain about you not reading my posting before replying to it, when you obviously didn’t understand the reference you were posting:
" (i.e., flu shots) are currently made in two ways … in order to produce an immune response"
I see nothing in either what you’ve posted or in my cite that supports your flat-out assertion, “A bad flu vaccine is worse than no vaccination, because it stimulates the immune system the same way that a flu virus does. A bad flu vaccine can make you very sick, the way the flu virus does. Even if it does provide good protection, and particularly if it doesn’t provide good protection, or if it turns out that there just isn’t very much flu around that year, a bad flu vaccine is just a bad vaccine.”
Since you believe my reading comprehension is poor, perhaps you should post your response in simple sentences, with one syllable words, and include links so I can ask the more intelligent members of my household to explain them to me.
I think people are talking out of their asses when they speak with any degree of certainty on this virus. There’s too much we don’t know about it to be saying that kind of malarkey. It just immediately rings the bullshit siren. For one thing, children’s immune systems are very much in development until they mature. They get sick more because their body doesn’t have the same antibodies adults do.
It’s not clear yet why children aren’t getting as sick, but it may have to do with the fact that children are less likely to have the comorbidity issues such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other age-related illnesses, which seem to be particularly lethal in the cases that we’ve seen coming out of China.
Or it could be that this is an illness that tends to be less severe in children. It’s not unknown. Chickenpox, for example, is usually not a big deal for young children (although miserably itching) but extremely serious for adults, and the older you are when you catch the more serious it is likely to be.
It’s yet another thing we don’t know for sure about covid.