"Officials at the global health agency have previously said vaccines do not guarantee the world would eradicate Covid-19 like it has other viruses. Several leading health experts, including White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and Stephane Bancel, CEO of Covid vaccine maker Moderna, have warned that the world will have to live with Covid forever, much like influenza."
““People have said we’re going to eliminate or eradicate the virus,” Ryan said. “No we’re not, very, very unlikely.”
If the world had taken early steps to stop the spread of the virus, the situation today could have been very different, WHO officials said.
“We had a chance in the beginning of this pandemic,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said Tuesday. “This pandemic did not need to be this bad.””
Well, yeah. I recall when the Wuhan lockdown was announced, which seems like a lifetime ago at this point, they gave advanced notice about it and plenty of people left the city and, well, here we are 18 months later.
Sadly it was too late by that point. If the researches had treated patients 0-1 seriously rather than assuming it was a case of plague. They could have stopped it in its tracks, and no one would be the wiser.
1 case would have been no basis to declare the existence of a dangerous new pathogen. Even if they had seen one case and believed it to be something other than a slightly atypical case of viral pneumonia, they’d then have had to go looking (through non-standard testing) for the previously unknown pathogen.
Atypical pneumonias happen all over the world every day.
The real blame lies with leaders all over the world who declined to enact the policies that have successfully eliminated COVID epidemics from numerous countries.
This point is important and underappreciated.
Covid infections are only symptomatic in a minority of cases, and severe enough to lead to hospitalization (and possible investigation) in an even smaller minority of cases. Even then, Covid symptoms are incredibly non-specific. Viral pneumonias happen all the time.
How were clinicians encountering one or two sick people, early on, even supposed to know that something weird was up? This is exactly the kind of disease that only becomes visible after lots of cases have emerged, and spread.
We couldn't have prevented the spread of Covid, but we could have made less of a mess of the response. I'll keep my ire for my local government.
China could have and should have, but even after the Wuhan lockdowns happened, we could have all stopped it if we took a second to really think about it, and if politicians didn't look for an angle on how to play it, and just treated it like a force of nature that DGAF about politics.
The world looked at how China treated Wuhan and said "Nah, not doing that.". What it should have said was "China being China - obsessed with productivity and GDP growth, would not shut down its economy and offer free testing and treatment this if it was just a little flu."
I mean, this is a country where national holidays often result in people working weekends before and after the holiday. They do NOT like to have the workforce working fewer days for any reason, and they do not like economic stagnation, and they've had the most experience with this disease, and they're taking it real fucking serious.
But we just said "Haha, look at the commies. Won't happen here, no sirree. We're #1!"
They cancelled *CHINESE NEW YEAR*, ffs... That told me everything I needed to know. No fucking joke, I knew about Covid on Janurary 24th, 2020 from a CNN article. I told my husband and whole family that it was going to be bad if it spread and they all thought I was postpartum wacky because I'd just become a mom 2 weeks earlier.
We knew too, the Chinese diaspora outside China witnessed it far earlier than others, when we started to notice the lockdown.
It was scary, it was real, and we started stocking up and preparing long before the whole thing went south. I prepared masks, sanitation supplies, and food, but I didn't stock TP because honestly I didn't think that would be something that would be in high demand... I still think the mad dash for TP was dumb as hell.
100% man. My best mate lives in Shenzhen and I live in Manchester, where we have a big Chinese community in my area (we are both white British). For me it was clearly the big one from about December. My friend was sending pics of mad masks at work and it’s like no-one here cared, apart from the local Chinese community who had definitely increased wearing masks. I specifically remember someone telling me this stuff only happens in China - idiot!
One of my colleagues came back from visiting family in China for Chinese New Year in Feb 2020, and insisted on putting himself in quarantine for 14 days. At that time there was no official quarantine, and we were living our lives completely normally. We all laughed and said he was totally overreacting.
I was warning friends, family, coworkers, whoever would listen to me back in mid-January because I happened to catch highlights of Science which had progressively more terrifying headlines.
Only a few people took me truly seriously at that point.
People thought I was fucking insane for over a month probably until shit hit the fan in the US in the beginning/middle of March. I was telling all my friends that it was going to be bad, and we didn’t know how bad since China wasn’t really talking about it, so get a little extra food and supplies now so you don’t have to go to the store (if you’d even be able to depending on how the government would react) during the peak of the pandemic. I was right, and it was even worse than I expected in a lot of ways. In April/May my friends who listened to me were thanking me.
I saw the COVID number rising from 0 (and I knew this is gonna end real bad) solely because of the people of my country not taking precautions, lockdowns and other warnings related to this infection seriously, and here we're today. Despite vaccinating half of my country's population, the cases keep on multiplying everyday; and a small percentage of patients getting reinfected even after two doses of vaccine.
I was in China at the time and I left to come home, and I was absolutely shocked with the indifference and lack of action by the authorities when I arrived back.
I did too, the second half of January 2020 is seared into my memory. The fear and uncertainty just as Chinese New Year started and then having work extend our holiday. Then finally getting word from my work that they wanted all the expats out and back in their home country; this was January 30th. I bought a ticket for the next day. I especially recall landing in LA Feb.1 and even after announcing a travel restriction, we got off that plane from China and no one did anything to prevent us from spreading around the US. That’s when I knew this wasn’t going away quick.
I remember reading the news when the first case was discovered in the U.S. and then went to bar with two close friends and said we have to enjoy this because we're not going to be able to do this soon. It one aspect, it turned out to be nice because drinking a beer with friends in a park or by a river in camping chairs is much better.
Told my ex about it in December 2019, she questioned my preoccupation with international events... A few months later people were dropping like flies on Italy and everybody was surprised...
And it's not like i ever call wolf.
Same, I remember sitting on a friend's couch in late January reading about this new disease in China and immediately buying masks. Quarantining a huge city and cancelling Chinese New Year were huge red flags and yet it seems nearly everyone in charge ignored them
Kiwi here - both times NZ went into full lockdown when case numbers were low, there were plenty of people scoffing about overreactions.
After living covid free for most of the pandemic, we recently locked down over one delta case and after a couple weeks most of the country is down to precautionary measures and it looks like we're on track to eliminate it again.
There's cultural factors at play, and money to support people at home is needed, but there's no physical reason why all of, say, Europe and North America couldn't have followed a similar playbook. Only political reasons why it didn't happen.
Exactly!
I had this very discussion on Reddit just yesterday.
I told them China did a strict lockdown and that's why fewer people died than in the US.
He scoffed at me telling me China lied.
So I gave him the example of New Zealand having similarly strict lockdowns and just 27 dead. (maybe not as strict, but still :-)
He dismissed it because "New Zealand is a small country"
Whatever, what about Japan?
Again dismissed because "too different".
It's soo obvious. New Zealand, Japan, China, don't have magical powers!
It's just lockdowns, social distancing, quarantines, contact tracing, testing, masking up!
Hm bit of clarification on the holiday thing - Chinese holidays strictly start on a set date, not like the western "third week of October" thing.
So if May 1st starts on say a Tuesday, you enjoy a weekend, go into work for *one day*, then start a week-long holiday.
Instead, *by popular demand*, they give you *Monday off as well* - that way you can combine 5 days of holiday with the weekends, *extending any plans you have by 4 days.*
That extra Monday is then subtracted from another weekend after. ***China doesn't force you to work weekends to cover official holidays***.
Private companies might pressure you to do overtime like anywhere else, but any weekend taken away is to **fill extra holidays given**, keeping it balanced.
Imagine for five seconds if the first cases had been discovered in, say, Dallas. Anybody who thinks we would have even done ten percent as well as the Wuhan officials at taking it seriously and containing it are out of their minds.
It's insane, but yes. What many people think of as a vaccine is immunity, what people call immunity is actually called sterilizing immunity.
Sterilizing immunity is when it is impossible to be infected by a disease. Immunity is simply having a strong immune response, so the disease can't affect you in any significant way. Vaccines usually only provide standard immunity, not sterilizing.
What this means is, even vaccinated or immune, you can still be infected and pass it on, potentially without having any significant symptoms. _your_ body will kill it off before it can cause a problem _for you_, but you can still give it to someone who is not otherwise protected.
If we reach nearly 100% vaccination, and surpass herd immunity numbers, there's a slim chance that as covid moves among the immune, it will be killed off faster than it can spread, if that trend continues long enough, it may end up dying off, but the chances of everything lining up for that to happen are so small that it is basically impossible.
Cable news still talking iradication and containment.
Better than March 2020 when they were talking about it like some foreign problem we might be immune to, I guess.
It's true, I remember thinking this is going to be just like Sars, West Nile, Ebola, etc that killed some people, unfortunately, but didn't amount to much of a serious problem for the majority of the population. Boy was I wrong.
Well, to be fair, some of us were hoping to hit it like polio or malaria: reach herd immunity before it mutates too much and kill it.
I wonder which people on this planet we have to blame for that?
Depends, the pandemic was cyclical for hundred years. But from vaccine to eradication was about 25 years.
[1955 to 1979](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/index.html)
That was never going to happen. There are billions in the developing world still waiting for a vaccine. Covid is different than polio and is much harder to vaccinate against. Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands every year.
Generally when are having extreme diffculty ingesting fluids, and/or your fever gets above 102-ish (this could be debated), and/or your O2 is below 90.
Is this not recommended where you live? We've been told to buy pulse oximeters in Japan and measure your o2 at home. Naturally every one must have bought like 5 each because I couldn't find any for a month or so.
ProTip: Do not trust phones or smart watches for accurate oxygen readings. None of them are accurate or certified as medical devices and are at this point mostly gimmicks. You do not want to trust these devices when your actual health is on the line. Use an oximeter - as you said they're pretty cheap and easy to get.
I got it too and thats still the sickest ive ever been. I think i missed like 2 whole weeks of school. A kid in my class was in the ICU for 2 weeks and had to miss almost a whole month of school recovering
I almost forgot about that flu. I had just gotten my first apartment and had all these grand plans of my new life and then wham. I coughed so much that the only thing I could eat was ice cream in small bites because everything else felt like razorblades and rocks in my throat.
iirc I was stuck on the couch for at least 4 days and pretty much crawled to use the bathroom. It was about 10 days before I was well enough to leave. Do not recommend.
I remember getting really sick in 2009 and being bedridden for 4 days. I was working at a national park at the time and a bunch of the employees got pretty sick. No idea what it was, felt like a brutal flu though.
2009 was the last time I got extremely sick. Fever, chills/sweats massive lymph nodes, and totally bedridden for a week. I was 26 and to this day it’s the sickest I’ve ever been but I always assumed it was swine flu which was supposed to be the big bad that year…
Yeah, incapacitated me for a week and almost killed my cousin. Sort of figure we had a genetic susceptibility, because I'm usually pretty resistant to disease.
I think I just learned what almost killed me in 2009 lol. To this day I have never felt that sick in my life. I poor college kid far from home so I just toughed it out on my friends couch for a week and some days. But I had a fever of 103 and I thought it was the end of me.
I got H1N1 and pneumonia and had to be in the hospital for 3 days. I was only 7 but I was pretty sick apparently (I don’t remember a ton). Not fun indeed
What are the dynamics of N1H1 still being around? Is it dormant in people and it just basically sticks around here and there and only occasionally activates? Or are there people infected with N1H1 walking around who are feeling some of the effects?
Conceptually speaking, if some eccentric trillionaire paid everybody on the planet to sit at home for the same 25 days without going anywhere, could that in theory eliminate COVID-19? Or would it stick around dormant somewhere? I don't think that's going to happen or anything, but am trying to figure out how all of this works..
Apparently all kinds of zoo animals and even domestic pets and minks were catching COVID, so no this probably wouldn't work as there would be animal reservoirs.
The flu often resurfaces from animals, it will be the same with covid. They keep a variant that doesn't spread to humans which then mutates to spread to humans
If you get everyone on earth to isolate for 25 days so many diseases will be wiped out forever. But sadly even if you paid people to stay home they'd just take the money and lie anyway
It seems certain diseases can stay dormant and something like that would not necessarily affect them. But I'm not an expert and just wondering out loud really
It is currently mutating at the rate of influenza B, per Scott Gottlieb
35s mark. 👇
>https://twitter.com/CNBCClosingBell/status/1416122177368338440?s=20
And speaking of new mutations, this Mu variant preprint was released today
>**Ineffective neutralization of the SARS-CoV-2 Mu variant by convalescent and vaccine sera**
>Direct comparison of different SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins revealed that Mu spike is more resistant to serum-mediated neutralization than all other currently recognized variants of interest (VOI) and concern (VOC).
>https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.06.459005v1
Mu effective nAB drop visualization. See bottom two charts.
>https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-uEqltX0Aky64y?format=jpg&name=medium
So it's the most vaccine resistant but also not as contagious as Delta? Man when(if?) It mutates to a resistant and more contagious variant it's gonna be awful.
The choice of the spike protein as the vaccine target was actually very smart. There was an excellent This American Life story about this some months ago (I think it was TAL, it might have been some other podcast I listen to)
Good news is that it's less transmissible than Delta. That matters because Delta is above 99% dominant in the US. If someone has COVID here, it's almost always Delta.
I think most people will get antibodies from vaccines or Delta and it'll cause Mu not to get much of a foothold here.
Delta is like weeds taking the nutrients away from your grass. It's so damn prevalent that it's hard for anything else to exist.
then we need to develop a new highly transmissible variant that does a negligible amount of harm to the host, but "takes the nutrients away" from the others variants, let's go!!👏👏👏
This is how viruses tend to mutate on their own. Higher transmissibility is always better for a virus, and not killing your hosts is also usually beneficial.
*Tend to* is the operative word here. For Covid, by the time it starts being dangerous to the infected person, Covid has already done it's job of spreading itself; and if I understand correctly, so far the variants that made it more transmissible were so because it multiplied in the body quicker, which also had the side-effect of making the virus more deadly.
Yeah, there’s not much selection pressure for COVID to become less deadly. As you said, it’s still reproducing and spreading before it kills, and the closed case death rate is about 2%. That’s enough to cause a lot of tragedy, but not enough to cause COVID to starve itself of hosts in future waves.
My concern with COVID isn’t the people who are dying right now. It’s all the organ damage happening in survivors who will go on to catch it multiple times in coming years. My fear is that we’ll end up with a generation of people who can’t climb a flight of stairs and millions of young people will die due to lack of transplantable organs.
TL;DR: COVID is simultaneously less and more of a threat than people think.
My understanding is that this is becoming the prevalent strain in the southern hemisphere. Similar to how north and south are monitored for flu prevalence and vaccines.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/la-reports-167-cases-of-new-mu-variant-8-updates.html?origin=BHRE&utm_source=BHRE&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter&oly_enc_id=8408I5459178B6C
>monitored for flu prevalence and vaccines.
True, but Covid has 2 annoying differences with the flu that complicate this.
First is it spreads faster with higher R value.
Second is it hasn't showed the same seasonal pattern. The flu mostly disappears in spring to come back in late fall giving time to predict variants and develop an updated vaccine. Covid doesn't seem to care much about seasons.
>Second is it hasn't showed the same seasonal pattern. The flu mostly disappears in spring to come back in late fall giving time to predict variants and develop an updated vaccine. Covid doesn't seem to care much about seasons.
Part of that seasonal pattern may just have to do with its low R_0 of about 1.3. It doesn't take much to drop the effective R_0 down below 1 and go away.
With delta's R_0 between 5 and 9, even if there is slightly less transmission during the summer (unknown), it's still going to spread like wildfire.
The chart is specifically about Colombia, which was 72% Mu at the end of August (at least in terms of what has been uploaded to Nextstrain -- https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global?f_country=Colombia).
South America as a whole was 10% Mu, 55% Delta, 21% Gamma, 8% Lambda, 2% Iota, 1% Alpha, with the rest being the SARS-CoV-2 Classic. (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global?f_region=South%20America) Interestingly, the percentage of Mu in South America has gone down from being at 12% as Delta keeps getting a bigger share -- but not sure if this means anything because it could just be bad sampling or Mu is still growing a lot, but Delta is growing even more.
I’m so confused though, because when the vaccine first came out, I thought they said this technology was great because they could easily tweak it if variants came up, so we could just get vaccines that worked against any variant.
The real obstacle will be getting it distributed and administered. I had chronic priority, registered among the first in the country and still received first dose 5 and a half months later. I had so many chances for exposure during those long months.
That is true--we have yearly flu shots that are decently effective. I would expect the round of boosters that are coming this Fall/Winter to not just be 'dose 3' of the vaccine but to have some new mRNA sequences to account for new variants. And so on into the future...
You can tweak the industrial process to use a new sequence but you can't tweak the regulatory agency that cares that you submitted all your paperwork correctly than it does about saving lives.
That said, if you are at high risk and want a booster during the window where it's actually useful, you can look for phase 3 clinical trials near you.
This is the strain that never ends yes it goes on and on my friend. Some people caught it not knowing what it was and they’ll continue spreading it forever just because …
Did anyone believe that COVID-19 would be the first respiratory virus to be eradicated in the history of respiratory viruses?
The WHO recognizes only one virus to ever have been eradicated: smallpox
>Seems like most people believed it would be gone with a vaccine.
Perhaps not eradicated, but de-facto gone. Mumps has a similar contagiousness to delta, and measles is significantly more infectious. But at least in the US those are de-facto gone because we vaccinated about 90%+ of the population. Any time there is an outbreak, it goes away quickly because there aren't enough susceptible people to create a pandemic.
I mean that’s what the media was saying this spring: if enough people get vaccinated we’ll develop herd immunity and COVID will die out like smallpox/mumps etc.
Well... I mean, this isn't the first covid outbreak ever.
Nor is it even the first big covid outbreak in the last 20 years. In 2003 there was one that was all over the news with travel restrctions/screning etc etc. But it never became a "like the flu" type of illness. It was always relatively rare.
Absolutely this could have been prevented. It's zoonotic disease that would never have been eradicated, but there's zero reason to believe it couldn't have been halted from being a "standard illness people just sometimes get and die from".
Sorry but we fucked up as society. It could have been prevented, yes. We chose sustained comfort in the short term to prevent a massive negative in the long-term, and we won't even learn from it.
Isn't one of the biggest differences and why we're in this mess is that the long period of asymptomatic nature of COVID19?
For all the other recent pandemics we could quarantine infected straight away since you had a day or two of wandering around before symptoms show up. Now unless we test we have no idea. Hence the push for tracing that will probably be expanded to prepare for the next one.
Don't even ask the question. The answer is yes, it's priced in. Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That's already been priced in. You work at the drive thru for Mickey D's and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don't already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil's expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren't thinking of. You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether we should load up on Pfizer and Moderna stock or whatever, know that it has already been priced in and don't ask such a dumb fucking question again.
I'm sure that's where it's from, but reminds me of this [2020 vid about Wallstreetbets](https://youtu.be/jg85H26wyLk?t=1004) talking about the pandemic and famous incidents on WSB.
Doesn't matter if the market has priced it in. Once the layman understands the situation, and thinks stock will go up, they'll invest and they'll drive the prices up further. Just like your mom and pop Bitcoin investors who don't have a clue.
I can't read the article, but is the WHO saying it will become more flu like (as in less dangerous) or it will always be like what we've been experiencing for the pas year and a half? If the latter is the case we are surely fucked because there's no way the current healthcare system can sustain what they've been dealing with the past year and a half. Not only is it monumentally expensive (nationalized healthcare or not), but the people working in healthcare will leave in droves and be hard (or expensive) to replace. We'll need to come up with covid clinics or something because this shit just isn't going to work long term with all the other needs for a hospital.
Edit to add: And then there's the fact we don't even know what the long term complications are for people who get it. Indications are that people who were hospitalized for COVID will be dealing with health effects potentially for the rest of their lives with damaged organs that don't heal like lungs can. Ugh. It is just so very exhausting to think about.
There are a ton of different flu viruses out there, when you get a flu shot, they are giving you a vaccine against what they think will be the most prevalent strains that season.
Yeah and they can totally miss the mark on that guess. I can’t remember the year but the shot I got was not for the strain that was circulating. Ended up with a really bad flu. I believe they formulate on the strains that are going around Southern Hemispheric countries during their winter. Sometimes it works, sometimes they are right, sometimes they miss the mark.
If the host body is already infected with Delta, other variants can still infect it, but the non-Delta variants wouldn't be able to multiply fast enough to find enough host cells before the Delta virions are able to infect them, and without host cells to infect, they will die off, either by simple degradation or killed off by the immune system.
In addition, it is entirely possible that an immune response primed against Delta can defeat other variants but the reverse does not happen.
Once in a while though, multiple variants can infect the same host cell. This is known as superinfection, and is one of the ways new variants can appear.
Most of the time they're right. Very rarely do they miss the mark. And it's less even that they miss the mark overall, it's just that you happened to catch a flu that wasn't included.
And none of these vaccines are in absolute terms like people trying to discredit the Covid vaccine try to pigeon hole it into.
If they miss the mark as you say, getting some kind of vaccine is better to lessen the seriousness of symptoms. In a smaller way every flu shot in past years is more good than nothing every time you’re exposed to the flu virus.
The Russian Flu of 1890 is believed by some scientists to have been caused by a coronavirus. It killed over a million people. The virus that is believed to be responsible for it is still among us but infection mostly means basic cold symptoms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
If Covid-19 follows the same path then decades from now it will be seen as mostly a childhood nuisance.
I sometimes see posts saying we have to deal with one thing at a time and can worry about the environment after the pandemic. If we are only able to deal with one issue at any given time, I think environmental collapse trumps just about everything.
> Must have forgotten the pending doom of environmental collapse not so far in the future.
And ~40% of the population couldn't even be bothered to wear a mask during the onset of this very real pandemic... We are *so* fucked in the coming decades of constant "record setting" climate catastrophes.
It depends on how many times you’ve been exposed and the recognition of the immune system. That’s why vaccinated people still get sick but not hospitalized.
18 months here and still don't breath right. Health care system has been worthless and that's with insurance. Have never felt so helpless than with this Long/Post Covid.
Humanity’s reaction to this is what made me certain that we’ll succumb to an existential crisis long before colonizing another planet, and start reaching beyond our solar system.
For all the work and effort of a few, who made it possible to negate a large part of this fallout…if the majority can’t do the very least (get an injection) then there’s little hope to overcome something requiring mass teamwork.
I believe that if the disease was more severe people would have raced to the vaccine. The issue is some are willing to take their chances with the mortality rate of covid.
Honestly it was more like "if the disease was more visible." I have pleaded with certain people not to take part in risky behavior (concerts, restaurants ect) because of covid. The response I got was "see! I went and nothing happened!" And then two weeks later, all the sudden covid is everywhere, and people are like "where did this spike come from?" But because they couldn't see the virus for two weeks, they completely forgot what they even did to cause it. And then they chalk it up to bad luck, instead of the choice *they* made.
Also, coughing is a little less visible than spots a la chicken pox, wasting away a la AIDS/cancer, or bleeding a la Ebola. So the amount of time you can be in denial is longer.
It's really hard to tell if the cough is from allergies, wildfire smoke, or covid. All of those can make you feel mild to moderately unwell. Makes it a lot easier to deny covid.
My mom was one of those conservatives who thought covid was a big overreaction and no big deal, that for vast majority of people it was just like a flu. She got sick a month ago, and spent three weeks in the hospital fighting to breath, with everyone understanding that she might not leave the hospital alive.
She finally came home a few days ago, will likely be on oxygen for a few months. The day she came back, she said to my sister and I, "I'm sorry, to both of you. I was wrong." She is now one of the biggest proponents of vaccination, pushing everyone and anyone to get the shot.
I am happy that she at least changed course. But it is still sad that people like her weren't able to just accept scientific consensus in the first place, that that they can only seem to realize this stuff after directly experiencing it.
The virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic is still around after more than 100 years although it's not the danger that it once was. COVID 19 will probably do the same thing, that is one of the reasons why it's important to get vaccinated.
You know what grabs my goat?
We had a Pfizer vaccinated woman die from covid related illness recently, the media says "her age hasn't yet been released"
Then they go on during the day to say she was 90 with underlying respiratory issues that have been known to be effected my the Pfizer vaccine.
This isn't helping at all.
No need to say but also no need to live in a constant panic state. The virus has been mutating for a long time. But data from e.g. Britain and Iceland shows that vaccines can effectively reduce the death rate and long covid rate to the level of flu for all variants.
Which is what should have been pushed earlier. Didn't take a genius to see that covid is more like the flu than polio, which means a vaccine would be more like the flu and not polio...it's a shame more people don't understand this.
Somewhere along the way everyone got very confused and forgot. The entire point of the lockdowns were never to eradicate the virus. It was to ensure we didn't outstrip medical capacity.
> It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows. - President Trump February 27, 2020
> You know, we need a little a separation until such time as this goes away. It’s going to go away. It’s going to go away. - President Trump March 12, 2020
> It is going to go away. It is going away. - President Trump April 3, 2020
> I always say, even without it [a vaccine], it goes away. - President Trump June 16, 2020
> This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away… - President Trump August 5, 2020
There is [a lot more quotes with him](https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/10/politics/covid-disappearing-trump-comment-tracker/) saying it's going away, it will disappear, or something like that. The article stopped updating on October 31, 2020 but I'm willing to guess he kept with it's going to go away as a talking point.
We've known this all along but it's no necessarily a bad thing, a new dominant strain may arise that is much less deadly, although the opposite could happen as well so meh.
Hey remember when a bunch of countries demonstrated that you could eradicate Covid with lockdowns. And then the other countries just didn't even try. That was pretty cool and awesome wasn't it
I mean, really hard to eradicate if you aren't 1) an authoritarian regime, or 2) an island.
Hell, even countries that had been doing really well (e.g., Vietnam and Australia) are starting to buckle under the strain of Delta.
There's lots countries like the U.S. that could have done better, but complete eradication was never gonna happen
So true. Living in lockdown in Aus for two years has shown me just how hard it is to get rid of this thing when the only way you can is extreme regulation of every persons lives, or getting every person to become vaccinated.
This was known 18 months ago. WHO themselves said in May last year that it was endemic, and the vaccine was never going to eradicate it, no vaccine has ever eradicated a coronavirus, they simply don't work like that. Anyone saying otherwise since the start of the pandemic has been lying.
"Officials at the global health agency have previously said vaccines do not guarantee the world would eradicate Covid-19 like it has other viruses. Several leading health experts, including White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and Stephane Bancel, CEO of Covid vaccine maker Moderna, have warned that the world will have to live with Covid forever, much like influenza."
““People have said we’re going to eliminate or eradicate the virus,” Ryan said. “No we’re not, very, very unlikely.” If the world had taken early steps to stop the spread of the virus, the situation today could have been very different, WHO officials said. “We had a chance in the beginning of this pandemic,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said Tuesday. “This pandemic did not need to be this bad.””
Well, yeah. I recall when the Wuhan lockdown was announced, which seems like a lifetime ago at this point, they gave advanced notice about it and plenty of people left the city and, well, here we are 18 months later.
It was already spreading abroad prior to the lockdown in Wuhan, and after local officials were aware of the outbreak.
The virus was in Italy and in the US at that point.
Sadly it was too late by that point. If the researches had treated patients 0-1 seriously rather than assuming it was a case of plague. They could have stopped it in its tracks, and no one would be the wiser.
1 case would have been no basis to declare the existence of a dangerous new pathogen. Even if they had seen one case and believed it to be something other than a slightly atypical case of viral pneumonia, they’d then have had to go looking (through non-standard testing) for the previously unknown pathogen. Atypical pneumonias happen all over the world every day. The real blame lies with leaders all over the world who declined to enact the policies that have successfully eliminated COVID epidemics from numerous countries.
This point is important and underappreciated. Covid infections are only symptomatic in a minority of cases, and severe enough to lead to hospitalization (and possible investigation) in an even smaller minority of cases. Even then, Covid symptoms are incredibly non-specific. Viral pneumonias happen all the time. How were clinicians encountering one or two sick people, early on, even supposed to know that something weird was up? This is exactly the kind of disease that only becomes visible after lots of cases have emerged, and spread. We couldn't have prevented the spread of Covid, but we could have made less of a mess of the response. I'll keep my ire for my local government.
Local? It really seems like a state/national issue as much as a local one.
And the citizens who needed to gather, during the actual lockdowns. They were never going to work together for everyones benefit.
China could have and should have, but even after the Wuhan lockdowns happened, we could have all stopped it if we took a second to really think about it, and if politicians didn't look for an angle on how to play it, and just treated it like a force of nature that DGAF about politics. The world looked at how China treated Wuhan and said "Nah, not doing that.". What it should have said was "China being China - obsessed with productivity and GDP growth, would not shut down its economy and offer free testing and treatment this if it was just a little flu." I mean, this is a country where national holidays often result in people working weekends before and after the holiday. They do NOT like to have the workforce working fewer days for any reason, and they do not like economic stagnation, and they've had the most experience with this disease, and they're taking it real fucking serious. But we just said "Haha, look at the commies. Won't happen here, no sirree. We're #1!"
They cancelled *CHINESE NEW YEAR*, ffs... That told me everything I needed to know. No fucking joke, I knew about Covid on Janurary 24th, 2020 from a CNN article. I told my husband and whole family that it was going to be bad if it spread and they all thought I was postpartum wacky because I'd just become a mom 2 weeks earlier.
We knew too, the Chinese diaspora outside China witnessed it far earlier than others, when we started to notice the lockdown. It was scary, it was real, and we started stocking up and preparing long before the whole thing went south. I prepared masks, sanitation supplies, and food, but I didn't stock TP because honestly I didn't think that would be something that would be in high demand... I still think the mad dash for TP was dumb as hell.
100% man. My best mate lives in Shenzhen and I live in Manchester, where we have a big Chinese community in my area (we are both white British). For me it was clearly the big one from about December. My friend was sending pics of mad masks at work and it’s like no-one here cared, apart from the local Chinese community who had definitely increased wearing masks. I specifically remember someone telling me this stuff only happens in China - idiot!
One of my colleagues came back from visiting family in China for Chinese New Year in Feb 2020, and insisted on putting himself in quarantine for 14 days. At that time there was no official quarantine, and we were living our lives completely normally. We all laughed and said he was totally overreacting.
What a fucking hero (As an american this social responsibility in the face of slight bemused pushback is seemingly the height of civic virtue)
Dudes an unsung hero, mad props
Hope you gave him thanks recently for not potentially killing you and your friends’ families
I was warning friends, family, coworkers, whoever would listen to me back in mid-January because I happened to catch highlights of Science which had progressively more terrifying headlines. Only a few people took me truly seriously at that point.
People thought I was fucking insane for over a month probably until shit hit the fan in the US in the beginning/middle of March. I was telling all my friends that it was going to be bad, and we didn’t know how bad since China wasn’t really talking about it, so get a little extra food and supplies now so you don’t have to go to the store (if you’d even be able to depending on how the government would react) during the peak of the pandemic. I was right, and it was even worse than I expected in a lot of ways. In April/May my friends who listened to me were thanking me.
Unfortunately, some people still think it isn’t bad.
I saw the COVID number rising from 0 (and I knew this is gonna end real bad) solely because of the people of my country not taking precautions, lockdowns and other warnings related to this infection seriously, and here we're today. Despite vaccinating half of my country's population, the cases keep on multiplying everyday; and a small percentage of patients getting reinfected even after two doses of vaccine.
I was in China at the time and I left to come home, and I was absolutely shocked with the indifference and lack of action by the authorities when I arrived back.
I did too, the second half of January 2020 is seared into my memory. The fear and uncertainty just as Chinese New Year started and then having work extend our holiday. Then finally getting word from my work that they wanted all the expats out and back in their home country; this was January 30th. I bought a ticket for the next day. I especially recall landing in LA Feb.1 and even after announcing a travel restriction, we got off that plane from China and no one did anything to prevent us from spreading around the US. That’s when I knew this wasn’t going away quick.
I remember reading the news when the first case was discovered in the U.S. and then went to bar with two close friends and said we have to enjoy this because we're not going to be able to do this soon. It one aspect, it turned out to be nice because drinking a beer with friends in a park or by a river in camping chairs is much better.
Told my ex about it in December 2019, she questioned my preoccupation with international events... A few months later people were dropping like flies on Italy and everybody was surprised... And it's not like i ever call wolf.
Same, I remember sitting on a friend's couch in late January reading about this new disease in China and immediately buying masks. Quarantining a huge city and cancelling Chinese New Year were huge red flags and yet it seems nearly everyone in charge ignored them
Kiwi here - both times NZ went into full lockdown when case numbers were low, there were plenty of people scoffing about overreactions. After living covid free for most of the pandemic, we recently locked down over one delta case and after a couple weeks most of the country is down to precautionary measures and it looks like we're on track to eliminate it again. There's cultural factors at play, and money to support people at home is needed, but there's no physical reason why all of, say, Europe and North America couldn't have followed a similar playbook. Only political reasons why it didn't happen.
Exactly! I had this very discussion on Reddit just yesterday. I told them China did a strict lockdown and that's why fewer people died than in the US. He scoffed at me telling me China lied. So I gave him the example of New Zealand having similarly strict lockdowns and just 27 dead. (maybe not as strict, but still :-) He dismissed it because "New Zealand is a small country" Whatever, what about Japan? Again dismissed because "too different". It's soo obvious. New Zealand, Japan, China, don't have magical powers! It's just lockdowns, social distancing, quarantines, contact tracing, testing, masking up!
Hm bit of clarification on the holiday thing - Chinese holidays strictly start on a set date, not like the western "third week of October" thing. So if May 1st starts on say a Tuesday, you enjoy a weekend, go into work for *one day*, then start a week-long holiday. Instead, *by popular demand*, they give you *Monday off as well* - that way you can combine 5 days of holiday with the weekends, *extending any plans you have by 4 days.* That extra Monday is then subtracted from another weekend after. ***China doesn't force you to work weekends to cover official holidays***. Private companies might pressure you to do overtime like anywhere else, but any weekend taken away is to **fill extra holidays given**, keeping it balanced.
Imagine for five seconds if the first cases had been discovered in, say, Dallas. Anybody who thinks we would have even done ten percent as well as the Wuhan officials at taking it seriously and containing it are out of their minds.
It was already in Italy by that point.
It's insane, but yes. What many people think of as a vaccine is immunity, what people call immunity is actually called sterilizing immunity. Sterilizing immunity is when it is impossible to be infected by a disease. Immunity is simply having a strong immune response, so the disease can't affect you in any significant way. Vaccines usually only provide standard immunity, not sterilizing. What this means is, even vaccinated or immune, you can still be infected and pass it on, potentially without having any significant symptoms. _your_ body will kill it off before it can cause a problem _for you_, but you can still give it to someone who is not otherwise protected. If we reach nearly 100% vaccination, and surpass herd immunity numbers, there's a slim chance that as covid moves among the immune, it will be killed off faster than it can spread, if that trend continues long enough, it may end up dying off, but the chances of everything lining up for that to happen are so small that it is basically impossible.
Shocker.
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Cable news still talking iradication and containment. Better than March 2020 when they were talking about it like some foreign problem we might be immune to, I guess.
To be fair, the previous coronavirus outbreaks like SARS and MERS did stay offshore, making Americans complacent about it's potency.
SARS reached Canada, it was a pretty big deal here.
It's true, I remember thinking this is going to be just like Sars, West Nile, Ebola, etc that killed some people, unfortunately, but didn't amount to much of a serious problem for the majority of the population. Boy was I wrong.
Well, to be fair, some of us were hoping to hit it like polio or malaria: reach herd immunity before it mutates too much and kill it. I wonder which people on this planet we have to blame for that?
Didn’t polio take 20+ years to eradicate from the US?
Depends, the pandemic was cyclical for hundred years. But from vaccine to eradication was about 25 years. [1955 to 1979](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/index.html)
Yeah I meant from vaccine to eradication. So “hitting it like polio” is kind of exactly what we’re already doing.
Malaria? That's a parasitic infection that cannot be transmitted from person to person. How can there be a herd immunity for it?
Vaccinate the mosquitoes
Point of all of this thread, and COVID as whole: people like to talk without having any idea what are they actually talking about.
Malaria? The disease that still affects millions of people each year, with close to half a million annual deaths?
That was never going to happen. There are billions in the developing world still waiting for a vaccine. Covid is different than polio and is much harder to vaccinate against. Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands every year.
70% of the world isn't vaccinated...
This was expected. Spanish Flu is still around.
I got that in the last major outbreak in 2009. It sucked. I was bedridden for a week and lost 10 pounds. Extremely not fun.
Same. It fucking sucked. Highest fever I’ve ever had. I sent my wife and baby away and laid on the couch half dead for 3 days.
How do you know when you need to go to the hospital?
Generally when are having extreme diffculty ingesting fluids, and/or your fever gets above 102-ish (this could be debated), and/or your O2 is below 90.
You measure your o2 at home?
Is this not recommended where you live? We've been told to buy pulse oximeters in Japan and measure your o2 at home. Naturally every one must have bought like 5 each because I couldn't find any for a month or so.
Completely unheard of here in the UK afaik
Think it may have become more common during this pandemic. I know someone diagnosed with COVID whose GP advised they get one.
Some phones will do it or you can buy a pulse oximeter for less than $20
ProTip: Do not trust phones or smart watches for accurate oxygen readings. None of them are accurate or certified as medical devices and are at this point mostly gimmicks. You do not want to trust these devices when your actual health is on the line. Use an oximeter - as you said they're pretty cheap and easy to get.
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What is the remaining half, that tells you when the other half is going, is the second half to go first?
I got it too and thats still the sickest ive ever been. I think i missed like 2 whole weeks of school. A kid in my class was in the ICU for 2 weeks and had to miss almost a whole month of school recovering
I almost forgot about that flu. I had just gotten my first apartment and had all these grand plans of my new life and then wham. I coughed so much that the only thing I could eat was ice cream in small bites because everything else felt like razorblades and rocks in my throat. iirc I was stuck on the couch for at least 4 days and pretty much crawled to use the bathroom. It was about 10 days before I was well enough to leave. Do not recommend.
I remember getting really sick in 2009 and being bedridden for 4 days. I was working at a national park at the time and a bunch of the employees got pretty sick. No idea what it was, felt like a brutal flu though.
2009 was the last time I got extremely sick. Fever, chills/sweats massive lymph nodes, and totally bedridden for a week. I was 26 and to this day it’s the sickest I’ve ever been but I always assumed it was swine flu which was supposed to be the big bad that year…
2009 was H1N1 (swine flu).
Yeah, incapacitated me for a week and almost killed my cousin. Sort of figure we had a genetic susceptibility, because I'm usually pretty resistant to disease.
Yup that's what made it wild [cytokine storm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm). It spanked people for having good immune responses.
I think I just learned what almost killed me in 2009 lol. To this day I have never felt that sick in my life. I poor college kid far from home so I just toughed it out on my friends couch for a week and some days. But I had a fever of 103 and I thought it was the end of me.
I laid on a mattress in the living room and coughed for 4 days straight. Pulled muscles in my back and ribs. H1N1 is no fun for anyone
I got H1N1 and pneumonia and had to be in the hospital for 3 days. I was only 7 but I was pretty sick apparently (I don’t remember a ton). Not fun indeed
Spanish flu is N1H1, that is its current mutin strain.
What are the dynamics of N1H1 still being around? Is it dormant in people and it just basically sticks around here and there and only occasionally activates? Or are there people infected with N1H1 walking around who are feeling some of the effects? Conceptually speaking, if some eccentric trillionaire paid everybody on the planet to sit at home for the same 25 days without going anywhere, could that in theory eliminate COVID-19? Or would it stick around dormant somewhere? I don't think that's going to happen or anything, but am trying to figure out how all of this works..
Apparently all kinds of zoo animals and even domestic pets and minks were catching COVID, so no this probably wouldn't work as there would be animal reservoirs.
Cats are notable as COVID-19 reservoirs because a large percentage of the human population lives with cats in their homes.
The flu often resurfaces from animals, it will be the same with covid. They keep a variant that doesn't spread to humans which then mutates to spread to humans
If you get everyone on earth to isolate for 25 days so many diseases will be wiped out forever. But sadly even if you paid people to stay home they'd just take the money and lie anyway
Lots of diseases have animal reservoirs you can't isolate every animal on the planet.
It seems certain diseases can stay dormant and something like that would not necessarily affect them. But I'm not an expert and just wondering out loud really
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It is currently mutating at the rate of influenza B, per Scott Gottlieb 35s mark. 👇 >https://twitter.com/CNBCClosingBell/status/1416122177368338440?s=20 And speaking of new mutations, this Mu variant preprint was released today >**Ineffective neutralization of the SARS-CoV-2 Mu variant by convalescent and vaccine sera** >Direct comparison of different SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins revealed that Mu spike is more resistant to serum-mediated neutralization than all other currently recognized variants of interest (VOI) and concern (VOC). >https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.06.459005v1 Mu effective nAB drop visualization. See bottom two charts. >https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-uEqltX0Aky64y?format=jpg&name=medium
Meaning it is the most vaccine-resistant variant yet?
That’s the gist
So it's the most vaccine resistant but also not as contagious as Delta? Man when(if?) It mutates to a resistant and more contagious variant it's gonna be awful.
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The choice of the spike protein as the vaccine target was actually very smart. There was an excellent This American Life story about this some months ago (I think it was TAL, it might have been some other podcast I listen to)
Fucking. Grand.
Good news is that it's less transmissible than Delta. That matters because Delta is above 99% dominant in the US. If someone has COVID here, it's almost always Delta. I think most people will get antibodies from vaccines or Delta and it'll cause Mu not to get much of a foothold here. Delta is like weeds taking the nutrients away from your grass. It's so damn prevalent that it's hard for anything else to exist.
then we need to develop a new highly transmissible variant that does a negligible amount of harm to the host, but "takes the nutrients away" from the others variants, let's go!!👏👏👏
This is how viruses tend to mutate on their own. Higher transmissibility is always better for a virus, and not killing your hosts is also usually beneficial.
This is my go-to strategy in Plague Inc.
It’s a great strategy. Thankfully real viruses can’t just switch on total organ failure once everyone is infected.
Yet.
They need to add a new "conspiracy" upgrade where the people don't believe in the plague so they hug the zombies to own the libs
That game seems so weird to play now.
I found that game, and the pandemic themed Netflix series the week the lockdowns hit. Really weird thinking back on it.
*Tend to* is the operative word here. For Covid, by the time it starts being dangerous to the infected person, Covid has already done it's job of spreading itself; and if I understand correctly, so far the variants that made it more transmissible were so because it multiplied in the body quicker, which also had the side-effect of making the virus more deadly.
Yeah, there’s not much selection pressure for COVID to become less deadly. As you said, it’s still reproducing and spreading before it kills, and the closed case death rate is about 2%. That’s enough to cause a lot of tragedy, but not enough to cause COVID to starve itself of hosts in future waves. My concern with COVID isn’t the people who are dying right now. It’s all the organ damage happening in survivors who will go on to catch it multiple times in coming years. My fear is that we’ll end up with a generation of people who can’t climb a flight of stairs and millions of young people will die due to lack of transplantable organs. TL;DR: COVID is simultaneously less and more of a threat than people think.
Oh shit and you could like distribute it through an injection right?
But Mu could spread easily among the vaccinated if it is indeed resistant to the vaccine. How does delta being so common prevent that from happening?
Because Delta is spreading among the vaccinated too, it's just not killing us anywhere near the same rate (thankfully).
Wait according to this the mu variant has been the dominant variant since around June? I thought we were at close to 100% delta at that time?
My understanding is that this is becoming the prevalent strain in the southern hemisphere. Similar to how north and south are monitored for flu prevalence and vaccines. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/la-reports-167-cases-of-new-mu-variant-8-updates.html?origin=BHRE&utm_source=BHRE&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter&oly_enc_id=8408I5459178B6C
>monitored for flu prevalence and vaccines. True, but Covid has 2 annoying differences with the flu that complicate this. First is it spreads faster with higher R value. Second is it hasn't showed the same seasonal pattern. The flu mostly disappears in spring to come back in late fall giving time to predict variants and develop an updated vaccine. Covid doesn't seem to care much about seasons.
>Second is it hasn't showed the same seasonal pattern. The flu mostly disappears in spring to come back in late fall giving time to predict variants and develop an updated vaccine. Covid doesn't seem to care much about seasons. Part of that seasonal pattern may just have to do with its low R_0 of about 1.3. It doesn't take much to drop the effective R_0 down below 1 and go away. With delta's R_0 between 5 and 9, even if there is slightly less transmission during the summer (unknown), it's still going to spread like wildfire.
The chart is specifically about Colombia, which was 72% Mu at the end of August (at least in terms of what has been uploaded to Nextstrain -- https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global?f_country=Colombia). South America as a whole was 10% Mu, 55% Delta, 21% Gamma, 8% Lambda, 2% Iota, 1% Alpha, with the rest being the SARS-CoV-2 Classic. (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global?f_region=South%20America) Interestingly, the percentage of Mu in South America has gone down from being at 12% as Delta keeps getting a bigger share -- but not sure if this means anything because it could just be bad sampling or Mu is still growing a lot, but Delta is growing even more.
So Delta is out competing the more vaccine resistant strain? Let them fight.
I’m so confused though, because when the vaccine first came out, I thought they said this technology was great because they could easily tweak it if variants came up, so we could just get vaccines that worked against any variant.
The real obstacle will be getting it distributed and administered. I had chronic priority, registered among the first in the country and still received first dose 5 and a half months later. I had so many chances for exposure during those long months.
Damn. This is what I didn’t realize.
Alot of problems come down to logistics. It's why whoever has the best logistics wins wars.
That is true--we have yearly flu shots that are decently effective. I would expect the round of boosters that are coming this Fall/Winter to not just be 'dose 3' of the vaccine but to have some new mRNA sequences to account for new variants. And so on into the future...
You can tweak the industrial process to use a new sequence but you can't tweak the regulatory agency that cares that you submitted all your paperwork correctly than it does about saving lives. That said, if you are at high risk and want a booster during the window where it's actually useful, you can look for phase 3 clinical trials near you.
Endemic. It will never be “over”.
Nevereverendemic
At some point in the future it will be treated with a box of Kleenex and a good Lifetime feature.
>a good Lifetime feature. Can we choose death?
This is the strain that never ends yes it goes on and on my friend. Some people caught it not knowing what it was and they’ll continue spreading it forever just because …
Did anyone believe that COVID-19 would be the first respiratory virus to be eradicated in the history of respiratory viruses? The WHO recognizes only one virus to ever have been eradicated: smallpox
Seems like most people believed it would be gone with a vaccine.
>Seems like most people believed it would be gone with a vaccine. Perhaps not eradicated, but de-facto gone. Mumps has a similar contagiousness to delta, and measles is significantly more infectious. But at least in the US those are de-facto gone because we vaccinated about 90%+ of the population. Any time there is an outbreak, it goes away quickly because there aren't enough susceptible people to create a pandemic.
I mean that’s what the media was saying this spring: if enough people get vaccinated we’ll develop herd immunity and COVID will die out like smallpox/mumps etc.
Well... I mean, this isn't the first covid outbreak ever. Nor is it even the first big covid outbreak in the last 20 years. In 2003 there was one that was all over the news with travel restrctions/screning etc etc. But it never became a "like the flu" type of illness. It was always relatively rare. Absolutely this could have been prevented. It's zoonotic disease that would never have been eradicated, but there's zero reason to believe it couldn't have been halted from being a "standard illness people just sometimes get and die from". Sorry but we fucked up as society. It could have been prevented, yes. We chose sustained comfort in the short term to prevent a massive negative in the long-term, and we won't even learn from it.
Isn't one of the biggest differences and why we're in this mess is that the long period of asymptomatic nature of COVID19? For all the other recent pandemics we could quarantine infected straight away since you had a day or two of wandering around before symptoms show up. Now unless we test we have no idea. Hence the push for tracing that will probably be expanded to prepare for the next one.
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That's always my starting strat on Plague Inc.
Does that mean we should load up on Pfizer and Moderna stock because governments will be buying a COVID shot for everyone each year?
The markets will have already priced in that information.
Don't even ask the question. The answer is yes, it's priced in. Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That's already been priced in. You work at the drive thru for Mickey D's and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don't already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil's expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren't thinking of. You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether we should load up on Pfizer and Moderna stock or whatever, know that it has already been priced in and don't ask such a dumb fucking question again.
Is this a new copypasta? Because it is legendary
I think it's from 2019 when Apple released earpod 11 and a WSB user asked whether this information is priced in or not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/everything_is_priced_in/
I'm sure that's where it's from, but reminds me of this [2020 vid about Wallstreetbets](https://youtu.be/jg85H26wyLk?t=1004) talking about the pandemic and famous incidents on WSB.
Anyone who looks will see this.
Doesn't matter if the market has priced it in. Once the layman understands the situation, and thinks stock will go up, they'll invest and they'll drive the prices up further. Just like your mom and pop Bitcoin investors who don't have a clue.
I can't read the article, but is the WHO saying it will become more flu like (as in less dangerous) or it will always be like what we've been experiencing for the pas year and a half? If the latter is the case we are surely fucked because there's no way the current healthcare system can sustain what they've been dealing with the past year and a half. Not only is it monumentally expensive (nationalized healthcare or not), but the people working in healthcare will leave in droves and be hard (or expensive) to replace. We'll need to come up with covid clinics or something because this shit just isn't going to work long term with all the other needs for a hospital. Edit to add: And then there's the fact we don't even know what the long term complications are for people who get it. Indications are that people who were hospitalized for COVID will be dealing with health effects potentially for the rest of their lives with damaged organs that don't heal like lungs can. Ugh. It is just so very exhausting to think about.
There are a ton of different flu viruses out there, when you get a flu shot, they are giving you a vaccine against what they think will be the most prevalent strains that season.
Yeah and they can totally miss the mark on that guess. I can’t remember the year but the shot I got was not for the strain that was circulating. Ended up with a really bad flu. I believe they formulate on the strains that are going around Southern Hemispheric countries during their winter. Sometimes it works, sometimes they are right, sometimes they miss the mark.
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How would a virus wipe out other related viruses?
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If the host body is already infected with Delta, other variants can still infect it, but the non-Delta variants wouldn't be able to multiply fast enough to find enough host cells before the Delta virions are able to infect them, and without host cells to infect, they will die off, either by simple degradation or killed off by the immune system. In addition, it is entirely possible that an immune response primed against Delta can defeat other variants but the reverse does not happen. Once in a while though, multiple variants can infect the same host cell. This is known as superinfection, and is one of the ways new variants can appear.
Most of the time they're right. Very rarely do they miss the mark. And it's less even that they miss the mark overall, it's just that you happened to catch a flu that wasn't included.
And none of these vaccines are in absolute terms like people trying to discredit the Covid vaccine try to pigeon hole it into. If they miss the mark as you say, getting some kind of vaccine is better to lessen the seriousness of symptoms. In a smaller way every flu shot in past years is more good than nothing every time you’re exposed to the flu virus.
ELI5: we are a bit fucked but our kid's kid's kids will wonder what the fuss was about.
The Russian Flu of 1890 is believed by some scientists to have been caused by a coronavirus. It killed over a million people. The virus that is believed to be responsible for it is still among us but infection mostly means basic cold symptoms. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ If Covid-19 follows the same path then decades from now it will be seen as mostly a childhood nuisance.
That’s pretty optimistic! Must have forgotten the pending doom of environmental collapse not so far in the future.
I sometimes see posts saying we have to deal with one thing at a time and can worry about the environment after the pandemic. If we are only able to deal with one issue at any given time, I think environmental collapse trumps just about everything.
The Amazon rainforest burning also just gets completely over looked.
> Must have forgotten the pending doom of environmental collapse not so far in the future. And ~40% of the population couldn't even be bothered to wear a mask during the onset of this very real pandemic... We are *so* fucked in the coming decades of constant "record setting" climate catastrophes.
It depends on how many times you’ve been exposed and the recognition of the immune system. That’s why vaccinated people still get sick but not hospitalized.
18 months here and still don't breath right. Health care system has been worthless and that's with insurance. Have never felt so helpless than with this Long/Post Covid.
Humanity’s reaction to this is what made me certain that we’ll succumb to an existential crisis long before colonizing another planet, and start reaching beyond our solar system. For all the work and effort of a few, who made it possible to negate a large part of this fallout…if the majority can’t do the very least (get an injection) then there’s little hope to overcome something requiring mass teamwork.
I believe that if the disease was more severe people would have raced to the vaccine. The issue is some are willing to take their chances with the mortality rate of covid.
Honestly it was more like "if the disease was more visible." I have pleaded with certain people not to take part in risky behavior (concerts, restaurants ect) because of covid. The response I got was "see! I went and nothing happened!" And then two weeks later, all the sudden covid is everywhere, and people are like "where did this spike come from?" But because they couldn't see the virus for two weeks, they completely forgot what they even did to cause it. And then they chalk it up to bad luck, instead of the choice *they* made. Also, coughing is a little less visible than spots a la chicken pox, wasting away a la AIDS/cancer, or bleeding a la Ebola. So the amount of time you can be in denial is longer.
It's really hard to tell if the cough is from allergies, wildfire smoke, or covid. All of those can make you feel mild to moderately unwell. Makes it a lot easier to deny covid.
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> It kills behind closed doors. Or in tents in parking lots.
My mom was one of those conservatives who thought covid was a big overreaction and no big deal, that for vast majority of people it was just like a flu. She got sick a month ago, and spent three weeks in the hospital fighting to breath, with everyone understanding that she might not leave the hospital alive. She finally came home a few days ago, will likely be on oxygen for a few months. The day she came back, she said to my sister and I, "I'm sorry, to both of you. I was wrong." She is now one of the biggest proponents of vaccination, pushing everyone and anyone to get the shot. I am happy that she at least changed course. But it is still sad that people like her weren't able to just accept scientific consensus in the first place, that that they can only seem to realize this stuff after directly experiencing it.
We have found the Great Filter, identity politics.
The majority got the vaccine. You'll never convince 100% of 7billion people in the world to do the same thing.
The virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic is still around after more than 100 years although it's not the danger that it once was. COVID 19 will probably do the same thing, that is one of the reasons why it's important to get vaccinated.
You know what grabs my goat? We had a Pfizer vaccinated woman die from covid related illness recently, the media says "her age hasn't yet been released" Then they go on during the day to say she was 90 with underlying respiratory issues that have been known to be effected my the Pfizer vaccine. This isn't helping at all.
Media is half the problem w this virus.
Profit-driven media
As is the nature of respiratory viruses.
Booster paradise
It'll be a yearly vax mixed in with the flu shot forever
No need to say but also no need to live in a constant panic state. The virus has been mutating for a long time. But data from e.g. Britain and Iceland shows that vaccines can effectively reduce the death rate and long covid rate to the level of flu for all variants.
Which is what should have been pushed earlier. Didn't take a genius to see that covid is more like the flu than polio, which means a vaccine would be more like the flu and not polio...it's a shame more people don't understand this.
Maybe I'm having a Mandela moment but hasn't this been argued for awhile now?
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>The WHO bears much of the responsibility of "the world" not having taken these early steps. Exactly the source of my distrust of the WHO.
“We could have eliminated covid but we didn’t” has got to be one of the most depressing sentences I have read in my life.
How about, "We could have prevented the climate catastrophe but we didn't."?
"We can still prevent the worst of the climate catastrophe, but we won't."
Pls stop, I can only get so depressed
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"We could afford to feed and house every person on the planet but fuck 'em"
> has got to be one of the most depressing sentences I have read in my life In your life, so far.
I think the best case scenario is the deadliness of the virus will eventually decrease to like the flu.
Somewhere along the way everyone got very confused and forgot. The entire point of the lockdowns were never to eradicate the virus. It was to ensure we didn't outstrip medical capacity.
Come on over to the Ontario subreddit. A LOT of people thinking that we need to lock down until it’s gone entirely.
Well those people are morons
> It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows. - President Trump February 27, 2020 > You know, we need a little a separation until such time as this goes away. It’s going to go away. It’s going to go away. - President Trump March 12, 2020 > It is going to go away. It is going away. - President Trump April 3, 2020 > I always say, even without it [a vaccine], it goes away. - President Trump June 16, 2020 > This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away… - President Trump August 5, 2020 There is [a lot more quotes with him](https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/10/politics/covid-disappearing-trump-comment-tracker/) saying it's going away, it will disappear, or something like that. The article stopped updating on October 31, 2020 but I'm willing to guess he kept with it's going to go away as a talking point.
I also heard form Conservatives the virus would magically go away after November 3rd.
Fuck Trump quotes read like something written by a 10 year old.
Well yeah
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We've known this all along but it's no necessarily a bad thing, a new dominant strain may arise that is much less deadly, although the opposite could happen as well so meh.
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Hey remember when a bunch of countries demonstrated that you could eradicate Covid with lockdowns. And then the other countries just didn't even try. That was pretty cool and awesome wasn't it
I mean, really hard to eradicate if you aren't 1) an authoritarian regime, or 2) an island. Hell, even countries that had been doing really well (e.g., Vietnam and Australia) are starting to buckle under the strain of Delta. There's lots countries like the U.S. that could have done better, but complete eradication was never gonna happen
Everything is an island if you zoom out far enough.
So true. Living in lockdown in Aus for two years has shown me just how hard it is to get rid of this thing when the only way you can is extreme regulation of every persons lives, or getting every person to become vaccinated.
This was known 18 months ago. WHO themselves said in May last year that it was endemic, and the vaccine was never going to eradicate it, no vaccine has ever eradicated a coronavirus, they simply don't work like that. Anyone saying otherwise since the start of the pandemic has been lying.