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> We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes HIV is so fundamentally different that it doesn't make sense to include it as a comparison here

> We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes HIV is so fundamentally different that it doesn't make sense to include it as a comparison here. > there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market. The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon. 143k deaths in the US already, and we likely haven't even hit 10% of the population being infected yet. Treatments will help pull the death rate downwards, but without a vaccine we're likely looking at multiple hundreds of thousands more deaths.

djsumdog 6y ago
> HIV is so fundamentally different Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. All vaccines are different; they're not one blanket thing. Smallpox vaccines are attenuated virus (a virus that has mutated to be benign in humans; in the case of Smallpox, the first vaccine by Jenner was injecting people with Horsepox). Most Influenza vaccines are heat treated/inactivated virus. In all cases, vaccines try to produce antibodies and force our immune systems to develop a memory for a virus we haven't actually been exposed to. As shown in the links above, this might not work at all for coronavirus. To some extent, the actual interactions of vaccines, are somewhat opaque. This In A Nutshell video shows a very small part of the adaptive immune system, greatly simplified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw > The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon Exponential growth doesn't go on forever. It has to hit an inflection point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were. If you graph fatalities on a logarithmic scale, you'll see we're already well past the inflection point in the US: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of over-counting. Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. All these people getting surgery after 3 months are required to get tested just for their surgery, and a positive antibody test counts as an active case, even if they're not sick or have the virus at all. It's so bad in the UK they've stopped reporting fatality numbers due to issues with the data.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  > Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. SARS and MERS. > Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. I'd like to see evidence that this has happened, that's it's not some freak outlier, and that it has any meaningful impact on the reported death toll. Looking at excess mortality, it looks like deaths have been under-reported, if anything. It's getting tiresome to see people trotting out the anecdote about someone getting in a car wreck and being counted as a CoVID-19 death.
  - fiftyfifty 6y ago
    > Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. In Colorado there was lawsuit over this, because there was a case of a college age man dying of alcohol poisoning but he tested positive for Covid-19 so was counted as a Covid-19 death per CDC regulations. So the Colorado Health Department now tracks two numbers: people that died with Covid-19 and people that died because of Covid-19. As of right now the first is 1,752 deaths and the second is 1,615 deaths. Statistically it's not a huge difference, you can see the numbers here: https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case-data https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case-data
    - xienze 6y ago
      > Statistically it's not a huge difference 8.5% isn’t significant?
      - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
        These numbers aren't directly comparable. They're reported on different timescales, because determining cause of death takes longer than determining that someone who died had CoVID-19.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    In the UK, there are the daily public health england tallies, which are unrelaible and include anyone who has died and tested for covid. Then there are the stats from the ONS where they have actually verified that covid is the cause. The numbers are not very different.

djsumdog 6y ago

> HIV is so fundamentally different Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. All vaccines are different; they're not one blanket thing. Smallpox vaccines are attenuated virus (a virus that has mutated to be benign in humans; in the case of Smallpox, the first vaccine by Jenner was injecting people with Horsepox). Most Influenza vaccines are heat treated/inactivated virus. In all cases, vaccines try to produce antibodies and force our immune systems to develop a memory for a virus we haven't actually been exposed to. As shown in the links above, this might not work at all for coronavirus. To some extent, the actual interactions of vaccines, are somewhat opaque. This In A Nutshell video shows a very small part of the adaptive immune system, greatly simplified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw > The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon Exponential growth doesn't go on forever. It has to hit an inflection point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were. If you graph fatalities on a logarithmic scale, you'll see we're already well past the inflection point in the US: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of over-counting. Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. All these people getting surgery after 3 months are required to get tested just for their surgery, and a positive antibody test counts as an active case, even if they're not sick or have the virus at all. It's so bad in the UK they've stopped reporting fatality numbers due to issues with the data.

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
> Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. SARS and MERS. > Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. I'd like to see evidence that this has happened, that's it's not some freak outlier, and that it has any meaningful impact on the reported death toll. Looking at excess mortality, it looks like deaths have been under-reported, if anything. It's getting tiresome to see people trotting out the anecdote about someone getting in a car wreck and being counted as a CoVID-19 death.
- fiftyfifty 6y ago
  > Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. In Colorado there was lawsuit over this, because there was a case of a college age man dying of alcohol poisoning but he tested positive for Covid-19 so was counted as a Covid-19 death per CDC regulations. So the Colorado Health Department now tracks two numbers: people that died with Covid-19 and people that died because of Covid-19. As of right now the first is 1,752 deaths and the second is 1,615 deaths. Statistically it's not a huge difference, you can see the numbers here: https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case-data https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case-data
  - xienze 6y ago
    > Statistically it's not a huge difference 8.5% isn’t significant?
    - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
      These numbers aren't directly comparable. They're reported on different timescales, because determining cause of death takes longer than determining that someone who died had CoVID-19.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  In the UK, there are the daily public health england tallies, which are unrelaible and include anyone who has died and tested for covid. Then there are the stats from the ONS where they have actually verified that covid is the cause. The numbers are not very different.