3 ms·

Great, then you must be the perfect person to alleviate the following additional concerns I still have: - Isn't there a significant risk that immunity after in

by patrec 7y ago

Great, then you must be the perfect person to alleviate the following additional concerns I still have: - Isn't there a significant risk that immunity after infection might wear of too soon after infection for herd immunity to be practicable, at least without driving up the deaths yet further? - Isn't there a significant risk that we end up with a lot of people who survive but have long term health problems? - Wouldn't the fact that no one else seems to think herd immunity is such a hot idea any more mean the UK faces a high risk to be completely quarantined off by other countries? Brexit probably doesn't reduce the chances of that happening either. Could that not have a few bad economic and other effects? - Isn't there a significant risk that isolating vulnerable people or the infected in ICUs may not work as well as intended? What if a lot of nurses and doctors get infected and pass it on to other people who have no chronic problems but are temporarily weakened? What if it turns out that seeing a lot of people die miserably without being able to do much about it for weeks on end takes its toll on the current crop of health care professionals or the UK's ability to recruit future generations? - Wouldn't that most likely mean giving up on eradicating Covid-19 completely? Is it really desirable to permanently reduce life expectancy by keeping it around forever? - What if the virus changes in an unanticipated direction? Would the herd immunisation strategy not put exactly the type of evolutionary pressure on the virus that you don't want? Namely to become more virulent? Is that not a bit risky?

arcticbull 7y ago
> Is it really desirable to permanently reduce life expectancy by keeping it around forever? That ship has long since sailed.
- patrec 7y ago
  People keep saying so, but I have yet to see compelling evidence. Can you provide some? For what it's worth, I think eradicating something world-wide that has already spread widely beyond the relatively competent and affluent countries is going to be tough. But personally, I'd much rather see it eradicated in just competent and affluent countries than not at all.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    > But personally, I'd much rather see it eradicated in just competent and affluent countries than not at all. With something this infectious all it takes is one visitor from one of the have-not countries to put the have-country into total lockdown. That's not a realistic plan moving forward either.
    - patrec 7y ago
      Two points: 1. People don't just start to magically teleport around if you restrict their travel. I know that defies common wisdom, which is presumably why the UK and others kept (keep?) importing people from disease Epicentres like Milan or Teheran en-masse right up the point of total lockdown. But if, for example, Japan, the UK or Australia decide they don't want Iranians to visit their shores for a while, at least not without on the spot testing, automatic two week quarantine or other heavy restrictions: what is the would be Iranian mass-infector going to do about it? And is greatly restricting travel from incompetent countries really going to wreck your nation? 2. Vaccines are cheap. If it's possible to create a vaccine that is sufficiently safe and covers enough strains of the virus, you can just vaccinate enough of your population that the disease will, effectively, no longer be very infectious. Then you can intelligently spend some comparatively trifling sums to make such vaccination programs available to countries that genuinely can't afford them.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> Wouldn't that most likely mean giving up on eradicating Covid-19 completely? Is it really desirable to permanently reduce life expectancy by keeping it around forever? If herd immunity would have worked, then a vaccine will work. That might be 2022, but it's definitely not forever.
- patrec 7y ago
  The problem is that the more cases you have, the higher the likelihood that you will need to end up with multiple strains and need more than one vaccine, which may be fatal to eradication.

by patrec 7y ago

arcticbull 7y ago

> Is it really desirable to permanently reduce life expectancy by keeping it around forever? That ship has long since sailed.

patrec 7y ago
People keep saying so, but I have yet to see compelling evidence. Can you provide some? For what it's worth, I think eradicating something world-wide that has already spread widely beyond the relatively competent and affluent countries is going to be tough. But personally, I'd much rather see it eradicated in just competent and affluent countries than not at all.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  > But personally, I'd much rather see it eradicated in just competent and affluent countries than not at all. With something this infectious all it takes is one visitor from one of the have-not countries to put the have-country into total lockdown. That's not a realistic plan moving forward either.
  - patrec 7y ago
    Two points: 1. People don't just start to magically teleport around if you restrict their travel. I know that defies common wisdom, which is presumably why the UK and others kept (keep?) importing people from disease Epicentres like Milan or Teheran en-masse right up the point of total lockdown. But if, for example, Japan, the UK or Australia decide they don't want Iranians to visit their shores for a while, at least not without on the spot testing, automatic two week quarantine or other heavy restrictions: what is the would be Iranian mass-infector going to do about it? And is greatly restricting travel from incompetent countries really going to wreck your nation? 2. Vaccines are cheap. If it's possible to create a vaccine that is sufficiently safe and covers enough strains of the virus, you can just vaccinate enough of your population that the disease will, effectively, no longer be very infectious. Then you can intelligently spend some comparatively trifling sums to make such vaccination programs available to countries that genuinely can't afford them.

Dylan16807 7y ago

> Wouldn't that most likely mean giving up on eradicating Covid-19 completely? Is it really desirable to permanently reduce life expectancy by keeping it around forever? If herd immunity would have worked, then a vaccine will work. That might be 2022, but it's definitely not forever.

patrec 7y ago
The problem is that the more cases you have, the higher the likelihood that you will need to end up with multiple strains and need more than one vaccine, which may be fatal to eradication.