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So, it's great that they're investigating, but this reads a bit too breathless to be taken entirely seriously: "stop virus in its tracks" "a potential game chan
by rossdavidh 6y ago
So, it's great that they're investigating, but this reads a bit too breathless to be taken entirely seriously:
"stop virus in its tracks"
"a potential game changer"
"ground-breaking study"
...but further down:
"The question now is how to turn this new knowledge against the virus itself and defeat the pandemic."
Yes, that would be the question, which is much closer to the beginning of the process of developing and producing and rolling out a new treatment, than it is to the end.
In other words, while it's great that this kind of thing is being investigated, it is extraordinarily unlikely to impact _this_ pandemic. No doubt Covid-19 will come back again, several years after this pandemic has run its course, and it's great to investigate how to be better prepared for that. But this is not going to result in a treatment fast enough that this pandemic will not already have spread to its (historically normal, typical, well-nigh-inevitable) conclusion.
- nradov 6y agoCOVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) won't "come back again" because it will never go away in the first place. It has already spread so widely that it is now endemic in the worldwide human population (plus some other mammal species). Just like at least 4 other coronaviruses.
- FuckButtons 6y agoBut we made no attempt to eliminate those corona viruses and we have, the last I checked, something like 20 vaccines in development for this one, if anything is a candidate for going the way of smallpox it’s sars cov 2, there’s too much inertia behind our efforts to stamp it out, it might just take a while.
- nradov 6y agoWe were able to eradicate smallpox because it had no significant animal host reservoir. That isn't the case with SARS-CoV-2. Are you going to vaccinate all the bats?
- rossdavidh 6y agoTechnically, you're correct, but the 1957 flu "came back" in 1968, and again in 2009 if I recall correctly. Yes, I'm sure they were never completely gone, but at some point there are enough non-resistant people and it flares up again, and we would want to have better options for that "next time". But yes, technically, you're correct, it will never quite go away.