General > General Technical Chat
Vaccine
Zero999:
--- Quote from: gnuarm on March 19, 2021, 05:44:09 am ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 18, 2021, 08:19:41 pm ---No one is talking about allowing the disease to roam freely. It's why so much time and money have been spent on developing vaccines.
It would be great to get rid of it, but the consensus of opinion is it's not possible.
--- End quote ---
There is no such consensus opinion. When I talk of getting rid of it I mean getting rid of it roaming wild infecting and killing thousands a day.
--- End quote ---
Good, because that will happen, as we build up herd immunity, due to infection and vaccination.
--- Quote --- Look at the numbers in Australia and other places. The disease is rampaging because we won't do the simple measures that other places have done. They've shown it is possible, but in the US and elsewhere there are too many who not only don't think of others, they simply don't think. They believe in what they feel.
--- End quote ---
And look at the costs. There will always be a country where the population haven't all been vaccinated against COVID-19. It keeps getting into Australia and they have to respond with draconian measures. Once they've vaccinated most of their population, they'll have to let it in and test the vaccines.
--- Quote ---Put it into perspective.
How many children have died from COVID-19? Very few.
How many people have been reinfected and suffered from severe disease? For a start, reinfection is comparatively rare and most cases of reinfection are minimally symptomatic, with severe disease due to reinfection being extremely rare.
Once everyone has been vaccinated or infected, the pandemic will end, as has been the case with every other pandemic.
--- Quote ---Simply not true. Bubonic plague ravaged Europe many time over many years. Many other diseases have continued to rise and fall killing millions. If you look at the population of the world over time you will see a few downward spikes. These are all diseases ravaging the human population.
--- End quote ---
--- End quote ---
Bubonic plague is totally different. I relies on third parties to spread: rats and flees. The same is true of malaria. These diseases are controlled by removing the natural reservoirs and disease vectors, rather than quarantine.
COVID-19 will behave like any other respiratory virus which has caused a pandemic in the past. It is a viral respiratory disease, like influenza and other coronaviruses. The only way for it to spread is via person, to person.
--- Quote ---As to the idea that we can vaccinate out way out of this it entirely depends on controlling the ongoing rate of infection. As I have already explained, quite clearly, it will take months for this disease to be impacted as we try to vaccinate the world. No, that's wrong. It will take years to protect the entire world. If we continue to allow the disease to roam the world infecting large numbers it will continue to mutate at a high rate and almost certainly reduce the effectiveness of the current vaccines.
Yes, they can work, but they depend on the virus not changing and we are not doing what we should to minimize the chances of that happening... by not reducing the infection rate. Too many people literally make up their own facts and spread them around.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, there's no way the enitre world will be vaccinated against this. We've only done that with smallpox and are still not quite there with polio.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---A new pathogen emerges, causes widespread death and severe illness, then after herd immunity is reached, it continues to kill a small number of vulnerable people each year. The same happened with the 1918 influenza and it's possible the 1889 - 1890 pandemic was a coronavirus, which is now a common cold.
--- End quote ---
Anything is possible. Why make up stuff rather than discuss facts?
--- Quote ---If we do get rid of it. It will be due to herd immunity, rather than border control, quarantine, social distancing and track and trace.
--- End quote ---
Nonsense. Herd immunity will only protect from the virus that infected the population. When the virus changes that immunity ends as is demonstrated every year with the flu.
--- End quote ---
Yes, let's discuss the facts, rather than making stuff up.
Immunity isn't binary. If someone has been previously infected with one variant and the virus mutates, they might catch it again, but it's highly unlikely it will be as bad as the previous time, because their immune system will be able to deal with it more effectively. There are a few instances of people getting it worse the second time, but they're the minority.
If we put the two facts together: reinfection with a different variant generally results in less severe disease and mortality is extremely low in children, the result will be declining COVID-19 mortality, as we build up herd immunity.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---In Australia, they managed to cut-off western Australia, from the rest of the country, because there's nothing but desert separating it from the other states.
--- End quote ---
Now try to tell people they can't travel from South Dakota, to another state, with much lower infection figures? It's not possible to seal a US state off from the others, except for Hawaii and Alaska
--- End quote ---
What does that have to do with anything??? You aren't making sense.
--- End quote ---
You've missed the point. Australia can quarantine states because they're geographically isolated from one another, whilst the contiguous US can't do the same.
--- Quote ---What does that have to do with anything??? More nonsense. The island has ring of cities around the periphery. How is that relevant? What they have in common is a reasonable response to the disease taking action to quarantine anyone exposed to the disease, exactly as we would do if we had an Ebola plague. But with this virus, "It's just a bad case of the flu" that is killing more people than 10 years of the flu and still killing more.
--- End quote ---
This virus is more like the flu than Ebola, which doesn't spread via respiratory droplets. It's much more contagious and fortunately less deadly. Unlike Ebola, it spreads in asymptomatic people. One of the reasons we managed to contain the original SARS was because it was only spread by those who were already quite ill, making it easy to screen for with temperature checks. The very mild cases didn't spread to others.
It's only possible to do track, trace and quarantine, when cases in a country are very low. It also requires strict border controls, which are difficult to maintain. The US and Europe long ago reached the point where this isn't possible and China only managed to do it because it's a big brother communist state.
Just to be clear, I'm in no way trivialising COVID-19 by comparing it to influenza. At the moment, it's much more danagerous than the flu, because most people have little immunity. Influenza is also a very dangerous pathogen to those who've never been explosed to it. Together with polio, it killed more Native Americans than the Europeans did.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: gnuarm on March 19, 2021, 06:07:54 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on March 19, 2021, 01:17:09 am ---The same can't be said for the various coronaviruses, which is why we can't edcadicate the common cold and flu variations.
Covid has already mutated many times. It's here to stay.
--- End quote ---
It is very disingenuous to compare COVID to the flu and definitely misleading to talk about the mutations in this context. COVID has mutated many times, just as humans mutate every day. The vast majority of mutations are harmful and cause death of the individual. COVID has had a few mutations, or more accurately, combinations of mutations that increase it's infectiousness and possibly it's lethality. The jury is still out on this, but that is how the evidence looks so far.
None of the mutations we've found appear to dramatically impact the effectiveness of the vaccines. But mostly that is being studied in regards to the mutations that appear to increase the infectiousness. As there are many, many mutations circulating, it may be that some have more resistance to the vaccine. Only time will tell us for sure as a larger percentage are vaccinated.
--- Quote ---Help protect the really vulnerable with vaccines, most likely with seasonal vaccine variations like with the flu, and the rest of the population will eventually get on with life.
Covid will eventually just be another a graph line on the yearly flu statistics:
--- End quote ---
That is clearly not in evidence. We can draw all the parallels we like, we can whistle in the dark, but unless we take effective measures to reduce the infection rate we are asking the virus to mutate and make this round of vaccines ineffective.
One of the things about this disease that I find disturbing is that not only do people not care about themselves, they don't care about others. My friend lives in a retirement community with nursing facilities. In the support staff of the general community something like 70% have been vaccinated. In the nursing facility only 50% of the staff have gotten the vaccine. It's not because of lack of availability, it's a lack of thinking or caring, I'm not sure which bothers me the most.
--- End quote ---
The entire point of my post is pointing out at covid is already endemic and it's not going away. We won't be able to eradicate it. It will very likely be a seasonal whack-a-mole thing forever. The vaccine isn't a magic bullet to eradicate it.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 19, 2021, 09:35:24 am ---Just to be clear, I'm in no way trivialising COVID-19 by comparing it to influenza. At the moment, it's much more danagerous than the flu, because most people have little immunity. Influenza is also a very dangerous pathogen to those who've never been explosed to it. Together with polio, it killed more Native Americans than the Europeans did.
--- End quote ---
Influenza kills up to half a dozen people in my mum's retirement village every year alone, it's serious stuff.
We used to have hugely popular TV ads telling us to "soldier on" when we have the flu. That didn't age that well I guess...
gnuarm:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 19, 2021, 09:35:24 am ---
--- Quote from: gnuarm on March 19, 2021, 05:44:09 am ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 18, 2021, 08:19:41 pm ---No one is talking about allowing the disease to roam freely. It's why so much time and money have been spent on developing vaccines.
It would be great to get rid of it, but the consensus of opinion is it's not possible.
--- End quote ---
There is no such consensus opinion. When I talk of getting rid of it I mean getting rid of it roaming wild infecting and killing thousands a day.
--- End quote ---
Good, because that will happen, as we build up herd immunity, due to infection and vaccination.
--- End quote ---
I'm sorry that you can't understand what I'm saying. I have already explained to you why the vaccines won't be an impenetrable barrier to this disease. Rather than debate the facts you continue to make the same fallacious assertions.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote --- Look at the numbers in Australia and other places. The disease is rampaging because we won't do the simple measures that other places have done. They've shown it is possible, but in the US and elsewhere there are too many who not only don't think of others, they simply don't think. They believe in what they feel.
--- End quote ---
And look at the costs. There will always be a country where the population haven't all been vaccinated against COVID-19. It keeps getting into Australia and they have to respond with draconian measures. Once they've vaccinated most of their population, they'll have to let it in and test the vaccines.
--- End quote ---
Again, fallacious assertions. Australia has the virus. Some 10 to 20 people get infected each day. When they relax too much and stop taking adequate precautions or don't conduct thorough track and trace the infection rate rapidly ramps up. At that point they have had to step up efforts and return to more restrictions, but only twice. Once at the initial outbreak and again in August. At no time were they imposing "draconian" measures. None of this has to do with travel restrictions which have been in place the entire time.
The comment about "testing" the vaccine isn't even worth replying to.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---Put it into perspective.
How many children have died from COVID-19? Very few.
How many people have been reinfected and suffered from severe disease? For a start, reinfection is comparatively rare and most cases of reinfection are minimally symptomatic, with severe disease due to reinfection being extremely rare.
Once everyone has been vaccinated or infected, the pandemic will end, as has been the case with every other pandemic.
--- Quote ---Simply not true. Bubonic plague ravaged Europe many time over many years. Many other diseases have continued to rise and fall killing millions. If you look at the population of the world over time you will see a few downward spikes. These are all diseases ravaging the human population.
--- End quote ---
--- End quote ---
Bubonic plague is totally different. I relies on third parties to spread: rats and flees. The same is true of malaria. These diseases are controlled by removing the natural reservoirs and disease vectors, rather than quarantine.
COVID-19 will behave like any other respiratory virus which has caused a pandemic in the past. It is a viral respiratory disease, like influenza and other coronaviruses. The only way for it to spread is via person, to person.
--- End quote ---
There is nothing in that statement that indicates we will have a permanent immunity to the disease and it will not mutate to get around that immunity.
But it is very easy to prevent. Just as dysentery and other diseases are prevented by washing hands, this pandemic is prevented by avoiding contact with others who may be infected. Best practices are to trace contact and quarantine those who have had contact so that if they do become infected further transmission is prevented. This brings the spreading rate below 1.0 and the disease dissipates and dies out. That is a guarantee. Vaccines are not guaranteed to continue to work as the virus mutates.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---As to the idea that we can vaccinate out way out of this it entirely depends on controlling the ongoing rate of infection. As I have already explained, quite clearly, it will take months for this disease to be impacted as we try to vaccinate the world. No, that's wrong. It will take years to protect the entire world. If we continue to allow the disease to roam the world infecting large numbers it will continue to mutate at a high rate and almost certainly reduce the effectiveness of the current vaccines.
Yes, they can work, but they depend on the virus not changing and we are not doing what we should to minimize the chances of that happening... by not reducing the infection rate. Too many people literally make up their own facts and spread them around.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, there's no way the enitre world will be vaccinated against this. We've only done that with smallpox and are still not quite there with polio.
--- End quote ---
So you are arguing with yourself about this? Above you said the disease will end when we vaccinate everyone. Or are you suggesting we just allow the world to be infected killing huge numbers?
There's no reason why we can't vaccinate everyone who wants to be vaccinated. I can't imagine why you would even say that. The only problem are those who don't want the vaccine.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---A new pathogen emerges, causes widespread death and severe illness, then after herd immunity is reached, it continues to kill a small number of vulnerable people each year. The same happened with the 1918 influenza and it's possible the 1889 - 1890 pandemic was a coronavirus, which is now a common cold.
--- End quote ---
Anything is possible. Why make up stuff rather than discuss facts?
--- Quote ---If we do get rid of it. It will be due to herd immunity, rather than border control, quarantine, social distancing and track and trace.
--- End quote ---
Nonsense. Herd immunity will only protect from the virus that infected the population. When the virus changes that immunity ends as is demonstrated every year with the flu.
--- End quote ---
Yes, let's discuss the facts, rather than making stuff up.
Immunity isn't binary. If someone has been previously infected with one variant and the virus mutates, they might catch it again, but it's highly unlikely it will be as bad as the previous time, because their immune system will be able to deal with it more effectively. There are a few instances of people getting it worse the second time, but they're the minority.
--- End quote ---
No, immunity is not binary, but if the virus mutates in a way that eliminates the antigen the vaccine protects against it will no longer be impacted. Being non-binary doesn't mean there is no zero.
--- Quote ---If we put the two facts together: reinfection with a different variant generally results in less severe disease and mortality is extremely low in children, the result will be declining COVID-19 mortality, as we build up herd immunity.
--- End quote ---
You are not thinking about it correctly. Your conclusion is a possibility, but not a given. I'm not sure what the mortality rate in children has to do with it. As we build up immunity through infection we will see many, many more die. The total number of deaths in the US more than doubled over the holiday season because people weren't willing to take precautions. I am hoping people will see this and start taking the disease seriously. But there are still many in denial.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---In Australia, they managed to cut-off western Australia, from the rest of the country, because there's nothing but desert separating it from the other states.
Now try to tell people they can't travel from South Dakota, to another state, with much lower infection figures? It's not possible to seal a US state off from the others, except for Hawaii and Alaska
--- End quote ---
What does that have to do with anything??? You aren't making sense.
--- End quote ---
You've missed the point. Australia can quarantine states because they're geographically isolated from one another, whilst the contiguous US can't do the same.
--- End quote ---
First, that's wrong... Australian states are not isolated from each other. They all have common borders with people freely crossing them all the time. But even so, what does isolating states have to do with anything? The states of Australia were never quarantined. I'm not even sure what that means. People are quarantined.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---What does that have to do with anything??? More nonsense. The island has ring of cities around the periphery. How is that relevant? What they have in common is a reasonable response to the disease taking action to quarantine anyone exposed to the disease, exactly as we would do if we had an Ebola plague. But with this virus, "It's just a bad case of the flu" that is killing more people than 10 years of the flu and still killing more.
--- End quote ---
This virus is more like the flu than Ebola, which doesn't spread via respiratory droplets. It's much more contagious and fortunately less deadly. Unlike Ebola, it spreads in asymptomatic people. One of the reasons we managed to contain the original SARS was because it was only spread by those who were already quite ill, making it easy to screen for with temperature checks. The very mild cases didn't spread to others.
--- End quote ---
What is your point? Of course the diseases are not identical. The point is about the need for quarantine for those exposed to the infection. I mention Ebola because it has a higher fatality rate, so people take it seriously unlike COVID.
--- Quote ---It's only possible to do track, trace and quarantine, when cases in a country are very low. It also requires strict border controls, which are difficult to maintain. The US and Europe long ago reached the point where this isn't possible and China only managed to do it because it's a big brother communist state.
--- End quote ---
No, it does not require "strict" border controls. It simply requires that people with symptoms, or testing positive or being exposed to anyone with symptoms or testing positive be quarantined, including anyone traveling. Where do you get your information? You seem overly obsessed with border control.
--- Quote ---Just to be clear, I'm in no way trivialising COVID-19 by comparing it to influenza. At the moment, it's much more danagerous than the flu, because most people have little immunity. Influenza is also a very dangerous pathogen to those who've never been explosed to it. Together with polio, it killed more Native Americans than the Europeans did.
--- End quote ---
Several times you have talked about allowing infections to provide herd immunity and talked as if infections in children are not significant. I don't know what to call that other than trivializing human deaths.
No, we can't save everyone in the world. In reality wearing masks, washing hands and getting vaccines are not about protecting any of us 100%. The sad truth is that they are about reducing the spread of this disease and saving some lives. But by not treating the disease seriously we are costing many more lives than necessary. Very importantly, by allowing the infection rate to remain high (even if not as high as a few weeks ago), we are keeping the doors wide open to rapid mutations in the virus that put the effectiveness of the vaccines at risk. Right now people want out from under this disease and many feel they will be able to open up again even before we are fully vaccinated. Many US states are opening again so that instead of the infection rate dropping to near zero where we could effectively track and trace, the US continues to see thousands die each day and many more new infections with the numbers no longer effectively dropping.
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on March 19, 2021, 09:51:26 am ---The entire point of my post is pointing out at covid is already endemic and it's not going away. We won't be able to eradicate it. It will very likely be a seasonal whack-a-mole thing forever. The vaccine isn't a magic bullet to eradicate it.
--- End quote ---
I'm drawn back to my very first comments a year ago: that hopefully, this would be the thing to change human behaviour wrt. spreading respiratory viruses.
No dice, I'm afraid.
Some people sincirely believe a mask alone will fully protect them from the virus. The most egregious example I've seen with my own eyes was a person lifting their mask to lick their fingers so they could better grasp a vegetable bag from a roll in a grocery shop in the fruits-n-veggies aisle. :palm:
Truth is, a very large fraction of all humans are utterly stupid. I mean that in the clinical sense, as in they do not have the mental faculties to understand these things, complex mechanisms, interactions. No matter how well anyone explains the situation, they just do not have the ability to integrate that knowledge, and have it affect their behaviour. It's not a choice, it's a limitation they cannot help.
(Sometimes I wish we had religion strong enough to force a change in these peoples behaviour, but then I realize that sort of thing would be evil, even if the objective was to help people. So, I know I'm not better than anyone else; my failures and weak points are just different.)
Because of this, Dave is absolutely right: we simply acquired another endemic virus.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version