About 20 miles from my house is a vaccine factory that was partly funded by fed. government. It was designed to quickly scale up to produce millions of vaccines per month for just this type of pandemic. I assume that factory will be used to produce whatever vaccine works .
For the overwhelming majority of the population, this virus does not pose a mortal threat. They catch it, they may or may not show symptoms, and they recover. A small number (we still no not know this number, but I suspect it is less than 1% of all infections) will die from complications. These deaths are heavily concentrated to those who already have conditions that put them at risk of death from other causes.
The reason for the lockdowns and curfews is that this virus is highly contagious and even a low percentage of serious cases has the ability to overwhelm the healthcare system. This prevents the healthcare system from being able to care for the accidents and diseases it was designed to take care of and results in the deaths of many people who have easily treatable conditions because the system is too overwhelmed to take care of them. This loss of lives for conditions that we can easily treat is why we had to implement the lockdowns in the first place.
Once the healthcare system is capable of handling these cases without being overwhelmed, the restrictions will be relaxed. That can be a result of wide-spread vaccination, because the majority of the most vulnerable have passed away, or because there are too few active carriers and too few susceptible hosts to result in a pandemic (so-called herd immunity).
We are already seeing the number of active cases dropping in some European countries, and I suspect we will see that number drop in the US before the end of the month of May. A drop in the number of active cases does not mean everything is peachy, but it will allow the healthcare system to position itself to be able to handle the situation. Once that happens, there really is no reason to continue with the lockdowns and curfews.
If you’re suggesting that the virus might eventually mutate into something less harmful, then I’d agree but in its current form, even with sound protocols, this is quite more lethal than flu and I don’t think this is even remotely debatable.
We don’t have sound protocols for this disease. I wish you would quit acting like we’ve already got this disease figured out.
Pakistan, not India, but I suspect in a similar position. During the said call they said they could probably make millions of doses a month once a vaccine was cleared. And step up to it PDQ.
Serious question. How do you see this working? We get off a plane and head to a testing area where someone swabs our nose and we wait for results? How do you test thousands upon thousands of people coming through airports on a daily basis? I’ve heard others talk about large scale testing but I can never get a feel for how that actually gets implemented. We have a tough time screening people getting onto planes in a timely manner, and all that requires is a special xray machine that does it in 1 to 2 seconds.
- Who is going to maintain the list of “potential symptoms”? Are you going to screen anyone with a fever? A cough? Sneezing?
- Even if you have a list of potential symptoms that won’t end up with 10s of millions needing testing on a weekly basis, who is going to monitor them and tell them they need to be tested? I don’t have to go through security checkpoints on my way to work, the grocery store, the park, etc.
- Even if potential symptoms are identified and screeners are posted on every block, how often does someone need to get tested? If I have a mild flu, I’ll have all the symptoms. I get tested, find out I’m not COVID-19 positive, and move along. The next corner store, I’m still symptomatic, and I get tested again? And again?
All these plans are great on paper. I just don’t see how to realistically implement them.
The largest continent, with the largest population, is the source of the biggest plagues? This is … completely unsurprising.
We had global vaccination campaigns to eradicate smallpox (successful) and polio (almost successful until a few developing nations resisted the campaigns). The probably isn’t producing the vaccine; it is developing and testing a vaccine that is really effective and getting cooperation to distribute it, especially if the issue becomes politicized. It is entirely possible that countries will seek to use the vaccine as a political bargaining chip despite the long-term consequences of not doing everything to prevent outbreaks, which is why it is important to have a global body like the WHO (however imperfect its response to this may have been) managing such an effort.
By definition, herd immunity (by some combination of exposure and vaccination) is the only thing that will stop a pandemic. But once herd immunity is achieved that doesn’t make the virus go away, especially, as it is apparent, felines and perhaps other mammals (aside from bats and pangolins) can be a reservoir for the virus from which it can spillback into the human population. This will almost certainly become an endemic disease like influenza with periodic outbreaks, and the virus may mutate sufficiently to subvert the initial vaccine we produce which means we need to have both surveillance systems and treatments for outbreaks of the disease itself. If we can discover when outbreaks occur, deploy effective antigen testing, and have a prophylactic treatments that prevent the disease from presenting the more severe respiratory symptoms we can minimize mortality.
And I’ll point out as I have in numerous other threads that this is not the last global pandemic we will face, and certainly not the most virulent. So whatever solutions we come up with need to extend beyond a vaccine specific to this pathogen. We need global epidemic surveillance and communication systems that are free from local and national interests so that we can be prepared to contain and fight epidemic disease before it becomes a global pandemic, and we need to seriously fund research and epidemiology efforts so that we are able to quickly develop tests and treatments to track and stop the spread of contagion. Looking at a vaccine as being the holy grail misses the point; we need to be better able to fight all infectious diseases, not just the last one we encountered.
Stranger
I’m not acting like we’ve got the disease figured out, but we already know it’s more lethal than flu. It’s common sense, really.
I don’t know what to tell you other than they are still figuring out best procedures. Whether Tamiflu helps is still an open question. Whether early intubation is helpful. Whether the entire health team needs to be in hazmat suits isn’t settled. We could be easily be missing some risk factor that’s making otherwise healthy people die.
Yes, it’s currently more deadly than the flu. The flu used to be more deadly too.
At our age, without a vaccine, we are likely going to live out our days in a state of self-isolation. That means likely never seeing my kids or grandkids again, which saddens me immeasurably. With vaccine development at least two years away (if ever), that means a lot of alone time for us. Yeah, I’m feeling pessimistic today.
We are going to be nowhere near heard immunity by the end of May and releasing restrictions too fast will just result in another spike of cases and overwhelming medical systems again, which will require another 2-6 week lockdown to bring under control again.
That doesn’t NO easing of restrictions… just that they will continue in some form for months, even a year or two, without a vaccine or good and readily available treatments.
If you think we’ll be able to go back to business as usual in May or even June you’re only fooling yourself.
Further, the flu kills between 300-600 thousand people per year. Are you confidently stating that covid-19 will easily surpass that range? And that it will continue to do so?
I think asahi was referring to the death rate (percentage of infected victims dying), not total numbers expected to die. We don’t have a good handle on it, but rates of 2-4% seem typical (as percentages of people known to be infected, of course, which means the actual death rate is almost certainly lower). It’s hard to get a handle on the death rate for typical flu because many people get infected and don’t even know it as well but that’s less than what we’ve observed with the new virus.
COVID-19 has an R0 of 2-3 (much higher than the 1.3 for typical flu), so each infected person typically passes it to 2 or 3 people, or 1.3 people for flu. If uncontrolled, one expects COVID-19 to kill more people than the typical flu does (faster and probably deadlier). However this is not guaranteed. Successful distancing campaigns, mutations, vaccinations and the like could all curb the spread, possibly keeping the number of victims below that created by the typical flu.
What we are doing right now is necessary. I am not disputing that. This has swept through so suddenly that it would have been crazy to assume things would go even this good.
Four months from now we are going to be able to look at this and see how it’s comparable to the seasonal flu. But I am rather confident that a month from now lockdowns will be dialed back and we’ll be carefully watching what the bounceback is. As it stands though, North America for the most part has been able to handle the first wave.
Where did I make that prediction? I didn’t.
I’m saying that covid-19 is more lethal than your garden variety flu strains that circulate the globe from year to year. As I said, covid-19 could eventually mutate into a less deadly version of itself. But absent of that, it would be wise for us to stay the fuck away from each other until we get vaccines and treatments.
I was reacting to the statement you made:
COVID-19 isn’t killing people because we don’t have the right protocols; it’s killing people because it causes acute respiratory failure at an alarmingly high rate. It exploits underlying immune weaknesses that flu does not, and when it does it is more likely to do widespread interstitial damage to lungs than seasonal flu. It’s also highly infectious, with an r0 value anywhere from 2 to 5, depending on the source. It may become less likely to spread over time if there’s true herd immunity, but that won’t make it less dangerous for people who contract it.
Not to ignore what might happen elsewhere but that’s what numbers I’ve mostly been focused on. But outside of the well known bad spots in Europe, I’m not seeing anything super scary. Am I missing something?
dp
:rolleyes:
Yes.
It is more infectious than the flu.
It has a higher death rate than the flu.
Because it’s new, no one on the planet has an initial resistance to it whatsoever. Unlike flu, where prior contact with related strains can impart some immunity.
I don’t agree with that sentiment, but I think some varient will end up happening.
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