3 ms·

The longer you do #2, the less you need #3, if the goal of #2 is to keep hospitals being utilized at the highest sustainable capacity with whatever safety margi

The longer you do #2, the less you need #3, if the goal of #2 is to keep hospitals being utilized at the highest sustainable capacity with whatever safety margins are required. As more people become immune, the spread naturally gets slower, reducing the likelihood of hospitals being overwhelmed in the first place and thus reducing the desire to maintain stricter control. The individual risk of any given social interaction is reduced. Conversely, the more infected, the more dead, meaning the number of life-years that would be saved via a stricter lockdown until a vaccine or effective treatment gets developed gets smaller and smaller. I believe the shortest time it has taken to develop a new vaccine is the 5 years it took to develop one for Ebola, so I don't think one will be available in any meaningful way for this pandemic, though I'd love to be wrong.

lbeltrame 6y ago
Most of the companies and universities working on vaccines have experience on earlier coronaviruses: for example Moderna and the Jenner Institute / Vaccitech worked previously with MERS vaccines. So they're not starting from scratch. Other companies like Sinovac have also been doing challenge testing already (I believe Oxford too, but AFAICS they haven't published anything yet) in animals, so far with good results. EDIT: Sinovac findings were a preprint, but now it's been published in Science, so I guess it has more weight. Also to speed up trials, Oxford is doing a hybrid Phase II / Phase III trial, hoping to get emergency use authorization in September if vaccine responses are positive. Lastly, most companies and consortia are ramping up manufacturing at-risk (because there's no guarantee vaccines will work) to make sure the demand is met earlier. So it is likely that if a vaccine works, it will be around earlier than before. Whether everyone will be able to have it, is a different matter entirely.

lbeltrame 6y ago

Most of the companies and universities working on vaccines have experience on earlier coronaviruses: for example Moderna and the Jenner Institute / Vaccitech worked previously with MERS vaccines. So they're not starting from scratch. Other companies like Sinovac have also been doing challenge testing already (I believe Oxford too, but AFAICS they haven't published anything yet) in animals, so far with good results. EDIT: Sinovac findings were a preprint, but now it's been published in Science, so I guess it has more weight. Also to speed up trials, Oxford is doing a hybrid Phase II / Phase III trial, hoping to get emergency use authorization in September if vaccine responses are positive. Lastly, most companies and consortia are ramping up manufacturing at-risk (because there's no guarantee vaccines will work) to make sure the demand is met earlier. So it is likely that if a vaccine works, it will be around earlier than before. Whether everyone will be able to have it, is a different matter entirely.