3 ms·

Great question. Reaching herd immunity does not cause a virus to stop circulating. It just stops it from spreading exponentially. That’s a common misconception.

Great question. Reaching herd immunity does not cause a virus to stop circulating. It just stops it from spreading exponentially. That’s a common misconception. What you are referring to is eradication, which has only ever been performed twice. SARS-2 is functionally impossible to eradicate due to its zoonotic origin and incredible spread. Even with herd immunity SARS-2 is here to stay. That’s not a problem though, even if we could so something about it. Why? Because SARS-2 kills the very old but spares the very young. Therefore once it has passed through the current population, the set of SARS-CoV-2-naive individuals becomes dominated by new entrants to the world, meaning babies/toddlers, the same group that does not die to COVID-19 in any real numbers. Therefore unlike Influenza, recurring deaths from COVID-19 will be incredibly low in subsequent years.

raphlinus 6y ago
As long as we're tossing around citations to the scientific literature which supposedly support our arguments, here's one I'm sure you will enjoy: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v2.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v...
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  See, they use general human coronaviruses as a model, instead of SARS-1, which is incredibly functionally and structurally similar to SARS-2. Why would you willfully ignore the enormous research literature showing enduring immunity developing from SARS-1? Oh, right, because either you haven't read it or you don't like that it doesn't support your conclusions. It's like, imagine we're discussing H1N1 reinfection, and we have a highly similar H1N0 which varies very slightly, and we know that doesn't lead to reinfection. But instead you look at a number of Influenza viruses in the same family but not nearly as similar. Don't you see how ridiculous that is? We obviously should use SARS-1 as a model for SARS-2.

raphlinus 6y ago

As long as we're tossing around citations to the scientific literature which supposedly support our arguments, here's one I'm sure you will enjoy: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v2.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v...

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
See, they use general human coronaviruses as a model, instead of SARS-1, which is incredibly functionally and structurally similar to SARS-2. Why would you willfully ignore the enormous research literature showing enduring immunity developing from SARS-1? Oh, right, because either you haven't read it or you don't like that it doesn't support your conclusions. It's like, imagine we're discussing H1N1 reinfection, and we have a highly similar H1N0 which varies very slightly, and we know that doesn't lead to reinfection. But instead you look at a number of Influenza viruses in the same family but not nearly as similar. Don't you see how ridiculous that is? We obviously should use SARS-1 as a model for SARS-2.