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Where did you get the 6 month figure from? It's true we really don't know how things will pan out long term, but we know that there are lot's of possibilities t
by icegreentea2 6y ago
Where did you get the 6 month figure from? It's true we really don't know how things will pan out long term, but we know that there are lot's of possibilities that all work out to something that's not awful in the long term.
For example, we already produce and distribute an annual vaccine on the scale of billions (the flu). The flu also has tampering effectiveness on a pretty short time scale. The flu vaccine is also not 100% effective. And despite all of those short comings, we're able to mitigate flu into something that people literally use as the low bar for infectious diseases in terms of spread and severity.
I think you're right that the vaccine is unlikely to let us eradicate coronavirus, but it'll let us get back to a new normal - one that isn't fundamentally different from our old normal (at least from a health perspective - who knows what happens at a societal or policy level).
- fpoling 6y agoThe flu vaccine efficiency is rather low, between 19% and 60% depending on the year, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies.... But what is interesting is that the current lockdown in Norway killed the flu with season ending abruptly.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThat's not surprising! The lockdown is a general-purpose counter to droplet/airborne-communicable diseases, it's not done for seasonal flu because the cost is seen as disproportionate to the known benefit. Stopping other communicable diseases is an expected side effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
- nradov 6y agoThose percentages don't tell the whole story. Even when the vaccine doesn't match the circulating strains closely enough to prevent infection, it typically mitigates symptom severity at least a little. For some patients that can be the difference between life and death.