Now that the corona virus has spread, won’t it always be part of the diseases that float around, just like influenza? Long-term, will containment plans be of any use? Will populations gradually develop immunity from exposure? Will it lose its virulence as time goes on?
I guess what I’m concerned with is that all the discussion seems to be on preventing it’s spread. But once it has spread, and all indications are that it is, what then? Does it somehow become an endemic disease that isn’t as serious as it is right now? Or is it a fundamental change to our way of life, for the foreseeable future?
No one knows yet: there have been types of infection which made a really brutal impact and then disappeared and others which continue on year after year.
Not necessarily. Some viruses readily branch into many strains, while others seem more stable (the likelihood of mutation is basically the same, but the likelihood of making viable strains differs from virus to virus). If Covid-19 is quite stable then perhaps it can be eradicated eventually.
Unfortunately there’s some data to suggest already two strains.
Also containment could have worked, but I would agree that that cruise ship has sailed.
Yes, it may well be with us permanently. You may have noticed that H1N1 continues to be a circulating flu strain. Preventive measures that are being taken now are about flattening the curve - spreading out and slowing the rate at which people sicken. This eases the burden on the healthcare system, and gives researchers time to develop a vaccine. Italy, for example, did not act quickly enough and their healthcare system is failing. So, long term, containment measures now are absolutely of use.
Since it’s low impact for kids, it may just turn into a thing kids get and shrug off, maybe without noticing. We just have this brutal phase for the first wave of adults. The next wave will have had it in childhood
Sporting events, conferences, and concerts are being cancelled or postponed. Colleges and universities are telling students not to come back after spring break. People are being told not to travel.
How will we know when, or if, we can resume such activities and get back to normal?
I am not sure, but I think in a few weeks the wave will have crested and things will settle down. The wave being the spike in initial infections, illnesses and deaths.
It may take a year or three, but they’ll come up with a vaccine. After that, life will return to normal.
In the meantime, it depends on how successful our social distancing measures turn out to be in slowing down the transmission of the virus. Serious kudos to colleges and universities, and the major sports and the NCAA in shutting things down.
Like it or not, practically all of us will get exposed to this thing sooner or later; the only question is whether it will happen at a rate that our health care system can handle. But even under the best scenarios, I think we really only kinda creep back to normal, possibly this fall, possibly not until next year sometime.
Once most of the population has been infected, it will have a hard time spreading. People can spread the disease without symptoms, but I suspect that people who are immune to the disease will not spread it. I guess it’s like SARS, which I believe still exists but isn’t killing very many people.
There will be a vaccine eventually, and there will be a huge rush to get it to people who need it the most (eg the elderly and health care workers). Unfortunately immunocompromised people get no benefit from this.
In itself it’s nasty, but it’s not THAT nasty. It’s not Ebola. So the point of trying to squash it right now is so that everyone doesn’t get it at once. So long as the initial peak can be flattened out, most people will be fine. If there’s a huge peak, that’s really bad and you don’t want to be in the middle of it. Long term effects are not really the worry (even if it turns out there’s never a vaccine - after all, the vaccine for the ordinary flu is sporadically effective or ineffective, year by year)
There are several possibilities to the course long term.
First coronaviruses as a family have a high mutation rate. Many suspect the existing human coronavirues that are the cause of 15 to 20% of common colds originated as cross over events from animal hosts at some point, and they mutate regularly changing their spike proteins such that new variants evade past antibody reactions. But they are not high virulence and for the very good reason that being too virulent is selected against, while lesser virulence allows greater spread.
So one possibility - it becomes an endemic illness of mild to moderate virulence, possibly with seasonality like the flu and other human coronaviruses.
Possibility two - it spreads very broadly over 1 yr, infecting some large fraction of the world’s population, whatever its virulence, leaving a high fraction of people immune to it in its wake, impeding its ability to spread too widely too fast in future years. As Kimera757 alludes to, and is the same sort of herd immunity that immunization programs aim to achieve. Problem is that herd immunity does not work great unless high fractions of the population are immune.
A few things that potentially inform speculations -
Animal origin coronaviruses crossing over to humans are highly unlikely something that just started occurring in the last two decades, yet we’ve had no identifiable coronavirus pandemics. Any that have occurred had at least been lost in the background statistical noise of interyear morbidity and mortality seasonal flu variation, and the only human coronaviruses around are relatively benign bugs.
WHY are kids so relatively unimpacted - either not getting it, or only getting such mild disease as to be undiagnosed, and apparently NOT very contagious? One speculation is that they have had enough recent and constant exposures to other human coronaviruses as to provide some level of protection (with adults having much less of that exposure and not as recently). IF SO, then it implies that a vaccine is reasonably possible and that those who have recovered should have pretty good protection for at some good while.
The concern Aspidistra is not only the size of an initial peak, but the timing of any possible second one. A peak occurring over summer when hospitals have some capacity would be less bad than a similarly sized one occurring concurrent with a moderate influenza season, for obvious reasons.
This is simply God’s way of somewhat-gently eradicating the earth of a Trump presidency. Now don’t fuck it up, America, or the next plague will be anal-boils. And after that the *really *messed up shit starts happening.
I’m not sure I follow the logic of this one. Why would adults have less exposure?
The main theory as I’ve heard it, is the usual one – differences in the immune system.
“The immune system” can often oversimplify what is a complex set of systems operating both in concert and in series. But one overall difference between infants and adults is that the former rely more on the innate immune system. It seems probable that for this virus, the innate immune system seems to be much more effective than the adaptive immune system.
Of course, we don’t know this yet. There are other hypotheses and for sure we need to research this.
Adults don’t go to preschool sticking toys in their mouths and seeing if their friends’ boogers taste better than their own. Adults do not swim in the same sort of cesspool. Their exposures to human coronaviruses are recent and repetitive.
The average preschooler gets 6 to 8 colds a year and over a dozen is pretty common. They are the drivers of contagion in the community for influenza. Yet not with COVID-19.
I’ll ask for a cite that kids of all ages have more powerful innate systems or weaker adaptive ones than adults (not the case), but in any case it fails as an explanation as it does not fit the experience with the under two crowd having greater risk with influenza than older children and young adults.
The differential kid response to this virus is different than to influenza. Very different.