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The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoWhen the linked article says that 90% of respondents find a "zero-COVID" strategy unrealistic, it is all the more baffling that Scotland seems to have decided on it. Before the UK-wide roadmap could even be rolled out next week, Scottish officials have announced their own that is guided by this approach, in which borders will stay closed even with widescale vaccination.
- 411111111111111 6y agoThese kinds of articles always have to be taken with a grain of salt. The whole situation has become incredibly ... Political, so most stuff you hear is just created to further an agenda. I'm not saying that this virus isn't dangerous or easy to eradicate btw. I'm only taking note that a lot of the information/articles floating around is propaganda with some agenda. Which is disheartening, precisely because of the nature of this virus.
- TerminalWarrior 6y agoScared people do silly things. Schools have stayed closed far longer than most health officials recommend. Many of our new daily routines are nothing more than "security theater". We know that kids essentially don't get sick and spread at very low rates and sterilizing surfaces, including using hand sanitizer, does little to nothing but we keep up up because we are scared.
- randomsearch 6y agoCan you link to an article saying this is the policy of the Scottish government?
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoConsider any of the coverage of the dispute between Scotland and Westminster on the hotel quarantine regulations, e.g. [0] Westminster is only requiring quarantine from a certain list of countries, while Scotland wants quarantine on all arrivals regardless of what country they come from. Sturgeon also said bluntly this week that international travel this summer is "highly unlikely", even though Westminster has been much more cautious about making such statements. The Scottish government has been particularly reliant on advice from Devi Sridhar at the University of Edinburgh, who wants a "zero-COVID" approach and says that allowing life to get back to normal within a country is worth Australian-style draconian border closings and quarantine obligations, even if they might last years. [0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/scotland-hotel-quarantine-all-air-passengers-sufficient-b919158.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/scotland-hotel-quarantine...
- neilwilson 6y agoGiven there is freedom of movement within the U.K. and that is a competency of Westminster not Holyrood, it’s going to be difficult for them to do that.
- randomsearch 6y agoto be clear for others: zero covid is not the policy of the scottish government, as far as I can google or the reply can support.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoThe Scottish government has called for obligatory hotel quarantine for all travelers flying in from everywhere à la Australia or New Zealand. That is pretty much the definition of the zero COVID approach.
- randomsearch 6y agoHere's the definition from the zero covid website. (http://zerocovid.uk/founding-statement/ http://zerocovid.uk/founding-statement/) What is the Zero Covid Strategy? It means eliminating the spread of infection between people in the UK and putting in place measures to prevent or quickly staunch any further imported cases. Today that means four key steps: - A full UK-wide lockdown until new cases in the community have been reduced close to zero - An effective find, test, trace, isolate and support (FTTIS) system, run locally in the public sector, to quickly squash any further outbreaks - Covid screening, and where necessary quarantine, at all ports of entry to the UK - Guarantee the livelihood of everyone who loses money because of the pandemic
- graeme 6y agoThere’s a big difference between zero covid globally and zero covid in a specific jurisdiction with good public health and border controls. The UK is an island and absolutely could have gone zero covid. I don’t think any island that aimed at it failed. But the UK had other goals and explicitly decided not to seek zero covid. Since Scotland had no interal border with England, zero covid wasn’t possible.
- throwaway4good 6y agoChina has implemented zero covid.
- yorwba 6y agoThere were multiple localized outbreaks in border areas and cities with international airports, because of lapses in quarantine measures. If Scotland wants to implement a zero-covid policy while England doesn't, they'll need to limit all cross-border traffic to a trickle, with supervised quarantine for everyone who does cross the border, and they'll need to treat a large area behind the border as a buffer zone where a single case outside quarantine immediately results in a lockdown. Not impossible, but unlikely to be popular before it's successfully implemented.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> Not impossible It might be. Scotland doesn't seem to have authority to prevent freedom of movement within the UK. In several countries, things like mask laws and business closures have been struck down by courts because it was found that the state doesn't actually have the authority to impose that.
- graeme 6y agoChina controls its borders. Scotland doesn’t. That was my point.
- throwaway4good 6y agoI think it is worth noting that for large number of people the lockdowns have been a boon (work from home, rising asset prices). The majority of the true cost is born by a tiny minority of people (people with no job security, self-employed within certian sectors, no assets).
- standardUser 6y ago"The majority of the true cost is born by a tiny minority of people" Do you truly believe that the millions of workers in food service, hospitality, etc are a "tiny minority"?
- throwaway4good 6y agoCompared to the group of people doing alright, yeah, they are a minority.
- 1986 6y agoYou've got the "large number" and "tiny minority" switched, I think.
- standardUser 6y ago"...borders will stay closed even with widescale vaccination" It will be interesting to see how long that policy holds when hospitalizations become minimal and deaths become incredibly rare. At a certain point, the borders will be closed to prevent the potential spread of the 10th or 20th most dangerous pathogen in a world full of pathogens.
- bluGill 6y agoDepends, if they can get to zero covid internally with a vaccine, but some new variant that the current vaccines don't handle well is circulating internationally it makes sense. Only time will tell if the above happens. There is great concern about a few variants, but nobody is sure yet.
- hprotagonist 6y agoi expect we'll wind up with "this year's COVID strains" to be part of an annual flu shot cocktail. And, i expect annual flu vaccines to improve exponentially now that we've neatly demonstrated the applicability of mRNA therapies for respiratory viruses! other endemic diseases we've got largely under control are neatly enumerated by the list of childhood vaccinations, for example https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc.... It's not like measles is "gone", after all.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoI agree with you but IMO there needs to be more of a political push for this to happen. We need much larger production capacity. Ideally everyone should be making mRNA vaccines, and we also need faster approval processes. We can't do a full 3-phase clinical study every time the vaccine formula is tweaked. We need faster turnaround times.
- ekianjo 6y agoThey dont do full clinical trials for yearly flu shots either...
- bryanlarsen 6y agoCOVID mutates a lot slower than the flu so it's unlikely that every year will need a COVID booster.
- throwawayboise 6y agoI'm hearing that the immunity from actually contracting and recovering from COVID only lasts about 90 days. Have any of the vaccines been shown to do any better?
- graeme 6y agoThat is....not true. There are scattered reinfections but it is far from the norm. SARS 1 and MERS generated immunity for years.
- williesleg 6y agoIt was always here, one of the viruses that caused the common cold before the conman cold.
- leokennis 6y ago> “Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon. It’s unrealistic,” says Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Name one way in which eradicating the virus is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon...
- appletrotter 6y ago"It's unrealistic."
- leokennis 6y agoIn that way, trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon is a lot like slicing 20.000.000 tomatoes and using the slices to build a cathedral in the desert for Mike McGear, Paul McCartney’s younger brother: it’s unrealistic.
- mumblemumble 6y agoNot every simile is an analogy.
- jbjbjbjb 6y agoI’ve not heard anyone actually explain why eradication is unrealistic.
- faitswulff 6y agoMostly because the virus evolves, it’s global, and various countries have differing containment strategies and vaccination capacity. Again, it evolves so whatever the most successful variant is will take root in areas which have poor containment and evolve again. Unless we can contain it and vaccinate against the latest variants globally and all at once, it will likely persist in some form or another. Here's a good article on viral escape: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/vaccination-pace-herd-immunity/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/vacci...
- nanis 6y agoIt is important to note that we are talking about one specific virus, SARS-Cov-2. There are zillions of types coronaviruses around us at all times[1]. They've been here a while and they'll be here or a looong time yet. Who knows, maybe with all these breakthroughs, someone might cure the common cold. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Infection_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Infection_in_human...
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- yarg 6y ago(I have very little biology knowledge, so treat this with a bag of salt.) My understanding of the protein spike mutations is that they consist of a number of deletions - and deletions that have shown up repeatedly in a viral genomics database (convergent evolution across related viruses). These seem to me to be a number of host (human) specific mutations that are actively selected for when one of the spike sharing viruses jumps to humans. The fact that these mutations are deletions (are they?) means there's a very real limit to the degree of change - there are only so many human specific optimisations that can occur, and once they are made it should be significantly more difficult to reverse them. Once all of the optimisations have been made, the virus's attack vector will be left static, and it will be left without the protein structure that it depended on to infect the species that it jumped from. The virus won't be completely backed into a corner, but it will be limited to a significantly reduced rate of change - which should make it easier to control. So how wrong am I?
- fspeech 6y agoEpidemiologists have been worried about corona viruses ever since the appearance of SARS and MERS. If Covid-19 manages to innoculate the globe against ACE2 binding spike proteins the outcome is likely a lot better than many have feared. There is a good chance you are right because we should really think of the receptors on human that let in the virus.
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- graeme 6y agoNote the twin charts. Big difference between odds of global elimination vs local elimination. 39% of experts think local elimination likely, a further group think it is possible. And it plainly is, a bunch of places have done it. Once we have vaccines widely it will be much easier to get rid of. Any country that succeeds in getting rid of it locally can have reciprocal travel arrangements with other countries or require proof of vaccination for entry. This is already common in many countries as a travel or visa requirement so it’s not outlandish to imagine countries with no virus locally may add vaccination as a requirement. The virus is seasonal too. So once you have a good chunk of the population immune it should be feasible to eliminate it in summer via testing and contact tracing. Global elimination would be much harder, but it’s not crazy to imagine there being a growing group of countries that stay covid free and maintain it via travel restrictions on those places that have large outbreaks. Due to possible future pandemics countries will probably have more viral border control anyway. This doesn’t necessarily entail a massive reduction in travel; so for clarity that’s not what I’m advocating above.
- dbetteridge 6y agoAs with most endemic viruses though, unless you hit a level of herd immunity you don't "get rid of it". It continues on in humans without immunity who may not show symptoms and in animal reservoirs (minks, ferrets etc seems to be the case for COVID). Unless we inoculate children as well as adults we are unlikely to hit herd immunity (based on the values thrown around of needing 85-95% coverage for an 80% efficacy vaccine)
- bpodgursky 6y agoBased on low in-school transmission rates, it's not obvious that the disease has a natural R > 1.0 among children (likely, because there is strong evidence that asymptomatic cases, which children generally get, have low transmission).
- bluGill 6y agoVaccines for children are in study phases now and expected late this year (for 12+, next year for the next group). Of course we need herd immunity, but signs are showing it is possible. The animal reservoirs are a real concern though.
- mikewarot 6y agoWe must eliminate it if we want to preserve our way of life. Covid has long term effects, not all known at this time. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.... Are you willing to have 5% of the population end up like me... short of breath, and pretty much unable to do more than 1/2 hour of physical labor per day? I can do grocery shopping, and that's it for me. [Update] I used to be a machinist, on my feet 8-10 hours per day. I feel like I've lost 10-20 years off my life. If 5% more of the population goes down each time they get it, you're going to run out of people.. just like Texas ran out of natural gas, when it seemed impossible. Never underestimate exponentials, and long term effects of novel situations.
- imnotlost 6y ago> Are you willing to have 5% of the population end up like me... short of breath, and pretty much unable to do more than 1/2 hour of physical labor per day? I can do grocery shopping, and that's it for me. 80% of the US population is there already...
- undefined1 6y agomore than 40% of US adults are obese and >18% of children. why we don't tackle that with urgency is beyond me, considering it's one of the main preventable health problems we have. and getting worse. "From 1999–2000 through 2017–2018, the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5% to 42.4%, and the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%. The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was $147 billion in 2008 US dollars; the medical cost for people who have obesity was $1,429 higher than those of normal weight" https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
- silicon2401 6y agoFixing it doesn't have urgency to the right people. Kids are too uninformed, adults are too busy and if they're fat, it's easier to cultivate acceptance rather than actually change your lifestyle, corporations profit from consumption so if anything they benefit as obesity and overconsumption is normalized, and people in positions of power and authority have no way to force people to eat healthy. Health and nutrition are one of the topics where people don't want to hear the truth or know the solution because it's inconvenient and difficult, even though it's straightforward and doable for a lot of people.
- notthemessiah 6y agoThis needn't have been the case. If the vaccine was freely-licensed instead of proprietary, we wouldn't have the production/distribution issues we're currently seeing: https://theconversation.com/covid-vaccine-supply-is-causing-an-eu-crisis-so-whats-being-done-to-speed-up-production-154153 https://theconversation.com/covid-vaccine-supply-is-causing-...
- meepmorp 6y agoFor another perspective on the matter, https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my... Odds are, the licensing issues aren't at all to blame for the supply and distribution problems.
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- chmod600 6y agoWhat does it mean for the government "emergency" powers? Are we permanently going to be less free? Will new powers granted to the government ever be taken away?
- alexeiz 6y agoIt means you can kiss what's left of your freedom goodbye.