Improved theraputics producing outcomes less severe than deaths?
It’s the dope. There’s always someone who gets the reference.
Jurassic Park
And more than a few who don’t. That’s why it’s annoying.
I got the reference immediately, and it’s actually a good reminder that viruses are “life” and they WILL find a way. (Although “Goldblum” nowadays could also mean that viruses will find an apartment - or perhaps viruses will find a new home? Goldblum Apartments.com)
FWIW, “Goldblumed” meant exactly zero to me. Though it was obviously a silly throwaway comment worthy only of being ignored.
But if he just ignored it, people will continue to reference popular movies on the internet. Someone’s gotta put a stop to that.
Okay, stupid question: is it possible to get “herd immunity” if there’s, say, a variant that is not affected by a major version of the vaccine? Why won’t that one variant get out of control 2020-style without it being specifically controlled by vaccination?
It could. This is a major reason why trying to get to herd immunity through infection is so dangerous. Right now, it looks like the three major vaccines are at least partially effective against the variants except for the South African one. The jury is still out on that variant. We got these variants because they were allowed to incubate in people with selective pressure.
Not so stupid. but here’s another way to think about herd immunity.
Herd immunity is what you get when “most” people have had it, and “most” of the survivors are now immune, at least for the near term, if maybe not for the rest of their lives. For various values of “most” depending on the disease. Notice nothing about that says the death toll or toll of crippled people will be societally acceptable. IMO humanity can get to whole-herd immunity without vaccines. We just need to accept a few million deaths and cripples to get there. A vaccine is just a shortcut to avoiding those deaths.
Now immunity (herd or otherwise) is only good against the current strain and others that are similar “enough”. Any given disease is always trying to mutate out from under the existing immunity of the target population. Said another way, once the disease is endemic, we’ll be dealing with mutating strains for the rest of history. By definition, whatever strain spreads is the one(s) to which the herd doesn’t have effective enough immunity.
You also can’t get to herd immunity with a disease that doesn’t trigger a long-term immune response. Every human has had the common cold. But because being ill with the common cold doesn’t confer lasting immunity to it, we just keep passing it around between people forever. Good thing the common cold isn’t real harmful.
If it turns out COVID immunity falls away after a year or two we’ll be looking at giving booster shots to all of humanity every year or so forever.
This might be somewhat off-topic for this thread … but have any serious-minded folks contemplated what would have happened had COVID swept through a pre-modern society? Herd immunity gets reached, but then variants sprout up – surely something much like that has happened multiple times throughout human evolution?
Spitballin’ here …
Had that happened it would have carried off a lot of the elderly. Of which there were not nearly so many to begin with. It would have, as it does now, kill very few people under 50.
In many ways COVID is a deadlier threat percentage-wise now than it would have been in 1800.
There is a strong chance in a pre-modern society that COVID-19 would have killed a double digit percentage of young people. This CDC page says that “up to 1 in 5 young adults with COVID-19 may require hospitalization.” Lots of weasel words there, because this stuff isn’t precise, but even cutting that in half to 10% of young adults requiring hospitalization, it would be pretty grim before modern medicine.
I don’t know how many of those people would recover without medical treatment (or worse, died due to the treatments of old-time medicine), but certainly many more than die today.
By historic standards though, losing a 20% of people over 60 and 5% below 40 (or whatever) might not have been that big of a disaster. I mean, it’s no black death.
One of my textbooks pointed out that afterwards, Latin learners had example exercises like “The roof of the abandoned building is falling in.”
Part of the reason this has spread so widely is that travel is so much easier than even the days of the “Spanish” Flu. That was exacerbated by the movement of troops etc. due to the war; had there not been a war, my WAG is that it would not have spread so far so quickly.
Before the mid 19th century, there was not even train travel to help diseases spread far and wide. Travel by ship might risk importing a plague of whatever sort: thinking of the smallpox ship ruse used in one of the Highlander novels, that ship was banned from port on the suspicion that one of the sailors had smallpox.
I am curious about how some of the famous plagues spread, beyond densely-populated areas. The Black Death didn’t just hit city dwellers, for example. I suspect that it didn’t jump from one town to another all that easily - but when there WAS an outbreak in one town and someone went to the next town over, it was contagious enough that it spread quite easily in the new town.
Nitpick: it is the Outlander novels series, by Diana Gabaldon. A sailor was carried off a ship and found to have smallpox. As a result the ship and it’s cargo was towed out into the harbor and burned. The other sailors were allowed to leave the ship with only the clothes they were wearing. In the novel, this occurred in Le Havre, France in the early 1740s. I haven’t finished the book yet but my memory from watching the filmed episodes is that those sailors did not start an epidemic in France.
Derp - you are absolutely right, and I knew better. Brain / finger disconnect, I guess.
In your fingers’ and brain’s defense, the novels are about Highlanders with an Outlander in their midst.
Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do.