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The flu "epidemic" never ended. The common cold "epidemic" never ended. If COVID mutates fast enough it will stay with us forever, with a potentially much highe

• bb123 5y ago
  I mean, what is the alternative? We spend the rest of our lives hiding in our houses? He is right - at some point we will collectively decide COVID is a risk worth running to actually live life. And it might be that it does make day-to-day activities more risky than before, but again, what is the alternative?
  • hef19898 5y ago
    Vaccination. Once herd immunity is reached, and maybe maintained by regular booster shots, the risk of returning to normal life is negligable. And that's why this whole conspiracy nonsense around vaccines is so dangerous.
    • 0-_-0 5y ago
      The flu vaccine didn't stop the flu, it mutates faster than vaccines can keep up. You can make the argument [0] that vaccinating during a pandemic (during which new variants arise faster) creates evolutionary pressures that favor variants resistant to vaccines, increasing the chance that virus mutation can get ahead of vaccine development. (Which is not to say we should stop depoying vaccines of course) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PgIUDn__WU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PgIUDn__WU
      • hef19898 5y ago
        Oh, sure. That's why yearly flu shots are a mix against the most likely flu strains for the given flu season. For Covid, I am not aware of a particular mutation defeating the existing vaccines. Besides the Indian one, which seems to cope better with a population that is to large extent vaccinated. And even that variant is then only dangerous for those not vaccinated. Short version: Any vaccine is better then no vaccine.
      • oddmiral 5y ago
        We can use face masks, which automagically produce vaccines (occulants) by killing viruses and then allowing us to ingale dead viruses, to alert immune system. I use this for myself. It's easy to make such mask at home for flu and SARS viruses, which means "no profit" for VC's. I tried to spread information about such masks dozens of times in my country with zero effect.
    • xyzzy123 5y ago
      I don't know about conspiracy, but the general population hasn't needed constant vaccination before. Maybe it's bad, maybe it's good and I suppose it's not that different than seasonal flu shots... but immunity by subscription still feels new to me. If we take it to the logical limit, does that look like family subscriptions to McAfee mRNA edition? A flu is sequenced in London and x weeks later the vaccination is included in my quarterly update package? EDIT: I'm getting downvoted a lot and I haven't even started on future doctor's office mRNA printers yet! Regulated to heck, partly for security reasons, vendor locked consumables and they use proprietary encryption. They have to jailbreak them in sanctioned countries and enterprising hackers work to decrypt the updates. You wouldn't pirate a vaccine! Would you?
      • ahevia 5y ago
        Constant vaccination? Are we all collectively forgetting all the vaccines we received as children...? The fact we’ve eradicated most childhood viruses because we vaccinated the general population? None of this is new. Just like the recommended seasonal flu vaccine. Most folks won’t bother to get their seasonal covid vaccine. If you were in that group before. Your life hasn’t changed.
        • xyzzy123 5y ago
          I'm pro vaxx! If covid is more severe than the flu yet requires a similar vaccination cycle (nobody knows yet!) that does seem like a major change to me. Childhood and travel vaccinations are once-offs and seasonal flu vaccination is a good idea but not a big deal for most.
          • irishsultan 5y ago
            You say that nobody knows whether covid will require a similar vaccination cycle to the flu, but that seems overly pessimistic. We have a fairly good idea how fast covid mutates and how fast the flu mutates and they are not in the same league, so it's very unlikely we would need a similar schedule.
  • 0-_-0 5y ago
    My issue is with the article calling that scenario "the end".
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • kypro 5y ago
      You're misrepresenting what OP is saying. > The flu "epidemic" never ended. The common cold epidemic never ended. It's almost like you didn't read the article because the point was made very clear that the "epidemic" does end when it transitions to something "endemic". Most people wouldn't regard the common cold as an epidemic as you suggest it is. You're correct that we still live with it, but that doesn't make it an epidemic. As daily deaths continue falling at some point people will stop seeing COVID-19 as an epidemic but something that's endemic and treat it more like seasonal flu. It's not the eradication of the virus that marks the end of a epidemic, but it's declining severity and our changing approach to the virus.
      • 0-_-0 5y ago
        You're misrepresenting what I'm saying. I put "epidemic" in quote marks for the reason you suggest. The argument that an epidemic ends when people get used to it is in itself nonsense. You need declining severity to an acceptable baseline too, and there's no guarantee that will happen with COVID. I mean you wouldn't replace a vaccination campaign with a "just get used to it" campaign, right? Although many people have actually tried to suggest that now that I think about it...
  • idnefju 5y ago
    Stopping world travel would’ve worked it out better. Like New Zealand and Australia. Suppression strategy with vaccines would have a solid effect.
    • logicchains 5y ago
      Here's an interesting geological fact about New Zealand and Australia: they're both islands! Believe it or not, it's much easier to control population flow into an island, than it is over a land border.
      • throwaway3699 5y ago
        Why is it hard to police a land border? Cameras and weapons are effective deterrents.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • geogra4 5y ago
        The uk is an Island too and it didn't seem to help them
        • thinkingemote 5y ago
          The idea is that an island helps with closing borders. The borders have been and are open in the UK.
        • SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
          It could have helped the UK, but you have to make use of it. If "it's much easier to control population flow into an island" then you still have to step up and control it. The UK government did not even show interest in doing that. The UK government mismanaged their borders, and most other aspects of the pandemic; notable exception being vaccination.
          • makomk 5y ago
  • bobthechef 5y ago
    Aye. Health and avoiding death aren't the goal of living. They are needed to live to some extent, but they're not the reason for living. Those disproportionately obsessed with self-preservation fail to live. There are more important things. And people seem to forget the other part: your death will come for you eventually so it's not as if by avoiding COVID you've avoided a car accident. Besides, the danger of COVID has been vastly exaggerated, but irrational and disproportionate fear has gripped the brains of a lot of people. People (typically white collar) also forget the deaths and health effects of the lockdown itself.
    • rorykoehler 5y ago
      I don’t think most people being cautious are scared of Covid-19. I know I’m not but I’m still not visiting my parents until they’re fully vaccinated because I don’t want to spread it and I don’t want to kill my parents who are both in a much higher risk group. I’m not remotely scared of Covid-19 now that we have more data though.
    • r0b05 5y ago
      So what is the goal of living then Bob?
      • loveistheanswer 5y ago
        Thats a subjective question. My answer: to live life fully with what little time we have. Memento mori.
        • r0b05 5y ago
          It is subjective and I do believe love is the answer.
    • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Avoiding death may not be the goal of living, but it certainly is a prerequisite.
  • homero 5y ago
    There was never a lockdown vs no lockdown. The entire point was to slow it down temporarily until we get treatments, vaccines and hospital capacity. We won't need quarantines any more if it stays slow enough. The biggest problem last year was no treatments and no hospital beds.
  • deegles 5y ago
    The alternative was to lock down properly for a few weeks early on and prevent it from becoming endemic, but that cat is out of the solar system at this point.
    • tartoran 5y ago
      Its too late for that and as it turns out it’s very hard to accomplsh. If a small group doesn’t comply they can re-spread it when the lockdown is over or eases
    • rhino369 5y ago
      You'd also have to make sure no new cases were imported (which means closed borders--i.e. troops on the ground not just canceling flights), AND you'd have to eliminate every internal case. It took Melbourne like 3 months to eliminate all cases. Far more than a "few weeks." It would take the sort of effort (for the US or EU) only possible with total hindsight. But if Trump tried to seal our borders with force in Jan 2020, there is no way Democrats would have accepted it. They'd call it rationalization for an attack on immigration.
      • TMWNN 5y ago
        >It would take the sort of effort (for the US or EU) only possible with total hindsight. But if Trump tried to seal our borders with force in Jan 2020, there is no way Democrats would have accepted it. They'd call it rationalization for an attack on immigration. Much worse than that. Remember, Trump's (first) impeachment by the House had occurred in December 2019. He was not acquitted in the Senate until early February. Patient Zero for the US is believed to have entered on January 15. Had Trump on January 14 announced a total and complete shutdown of the US border, Democrats and 95% of mass media would immediately have denounced it as Trump preparing a coup to seize total power, using the ridiculous pretext of a disease that had had zero impact on the US (and was racist to ascribe in any way to China).
• tomhoward 5y ago
  My understanding is that the reason for the high mortality rate is its novelty. I.e., because it’s unfamiliar, it’s a big task for the immune system to learn how to beat it, and elderly/impaired people lack the strength/energy to do it. Other cold and flu strains are less deadly these days as we’re all mostly adapted to them. Why would that not happen with this coronavirus too? Why do we assume that this coronavirus will mutate more quickly than the other coronaviruses that are already endemic?
  • 0-_-0 5y ago
    The flu has a "baseline death rate" it reached after coevolving with humanity. We don't know what tha baseline will be for COVID, and we don't know if we will deem that acceptable or not.
    • tomhoward 5y ago
      You seem to be insisting that there is likely something different about this coronavirus that means it won't end up becoming mostly-harmless-to-most-people, the way all the other influenza, rhinovirus and coronaviruses have done. What is the basis for this fear? Sure you can keep saying things "might" happen or "we don't know" this or that, but we do have a lot of historical precedent for these kinds of viruses, so it's reasonable to presume that it will become not-that-big-a-deal, the way all the others viruses like it have done.
      • 0-_-0 5y ago
        We don't know if it will, and what the costs will be. Saying "The end is near" as the article suggests is not justified by current evidence. So far the increase in the virues' virulence with new mutations wasn't correlated with decrease in deaths as far as I know, and the pandemic has been here for a while now (I only know about inverse correlation). This is not just like the flu.
        • tomhoward 5y ago
          You seem to be ignoring my point. The death rate is not because there's something special about the virus itself that makes it highly lethal. It's just that it's novel, so our bodies have to work harder to learn how to fight it off, and the frailest people don't have the fortitude to do that. Ergo, as it becomes endemic, and all of our immune systems learn how to respond to it, it's completely reasonable to expect that it will become benign to most people. (After all, it already is pretty benign to many/most people, compared to the original SARS and MERS). Repeating "we don't know" is an easy response, and something you can say in response to anything like this, but it's not really addressing the logic I'm presenting. You really have to demonstrate why this virus is substantially different to all the other respiratory viruses that have become endemic and mostly benign, which you've not attempted to do. You just keep saying "we don't know". Sure, but we actually have some solid historical precedent, and this virus is so-far showing no signs of being any different from all those before it.
• nradov 5y ago
  And some colds are caused by betacoronaviruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2. The only reason those don't kill many people today is that most of us are exposed as children and build up immunity. There is strong circumstantial evidence that another coronavirus emerged in 1889 and killed about 0.06% of the world population. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
  • Mordisquitos 5y ago
    Absolutely. In my not quite uneducated but nowhere near professional opinion, SARS-CoV-2 is not going anywhere, even in a best-case scenario of vaccine production and vaccination programmes, and will become endemic in the World population. However, the clinical presentation of COVID-19 as we know it will slowly disappear, and over the course of the next 5, 10 or 20 years will just become another common cold virus in circulation. There will indeed be severe cases resulting in pneumonia, of course, but there are severe cases of other common cold viruses. I think that what we've been living through in 2020 and at the moment is the birth of a new common cold virus from scratch. We're just lucky enough that our vaccine technology is advanced enough for our societies to speed up the process of training our immune systems to become accustomed to it with less loss-of-life than if nature had taken its full course.
• chitowneats 5y ago
  Indeed. Has there ever been a society that did not eventually make peace with the world's virome after a pandemic and carry on? Vaccine or no?
• theonlybutlet 5y ago
  The author literally addresses this directly, indications are that it mutates slower than the flu.
  • 0-_-0 5y ago
    The article says this: Luckily, because coronaviruses mutate more slowly than influenza viruses, they will probably be better matches than flu shots are. Many common cold viruses are coronaviruses, and we haven't eradicated them either.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      > Many common cold viruses are coronaviruses, and we haven't eradicated them either. There's hasn't been an incentive to - cost high, benefit low, after all it's just a cold. Maybe that will change now. There are new weapons in humanity's arsenal in the form of mRNA vaccines, and a huge incentive do develop this and to take these viruses more seriously.
    • theonlybutlet 5y ago
      It doesn't need to be eradicated. If it mutates slower, vaccinations and herd immunity would mean the symptoms experienced are mild and your resistance would build on that as time goes by being exposed to new variants which are only slowly mutating.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  Yeah but coronaviruses don’t mutate as rapidly as flu viruses, the vaccine from last year will protect against next year’s coronavirus. This will probably become like the measles where everyone gets a jab at age 3. And maybe a booster shot every 10 years afterwards. I don’t know anyone who’s ever caught the measles.
  • passivate 5y ago
    >Yeah but coronaviruses don’t mutate as rapidly as flu viruses, the vaccine from last year will protect against next year’s coronavirus. All RNA viruses mutate in the same fashion because of the way RNA polymerase functions. Its close to a statistical certainty. The absolute number of mutations is not strictly causal. What is relevant is whether the mutation(s) is beneficial (more internal spread while escaping host immune system) and whether this local variant has the fitness to dominate and spread externally. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you - can you explain what you mean ?
    • fallingfrog 5y ago
      I’m not a scientist, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard and read. The consensus seems to be that covid mutates much more slowly than the flu. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/coronavirus-mutation-rate.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/coronav... https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/how-the-coronavirus-mutates-and-what-this-means-for-the-future-of-covid-19-154499 https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/how-the...
      • passivate 5y ago
        Certainly, we can't all be experts in everything. I work in biotech but I only have a tiny area where I can feel comfortable making assertions. In any case, the articles you linked to are theories and speculation, not consensus.
        • fallingfrog 5y ago
• rsync 5y ago
  "If COVID mutates fast enough it will stay with us forever, with a potentially much higher mortality than the flu." Most likely not. If C19 mutates in a fashion that allows it to "stay with us forever" it will almost certainly come with lower (cold-level) mortality. That is one of the trade-offs that the virus genome has to "make" as it mutates. More lethality is a genetic dead-end because of vaccines. Cold level lethality is a genetic steady state that would allow it to thrive.
• Angostura 5y ago
  I think it important to distinguish between pandemics, covering most countries simultaneously, and isolated national epidemics. Flu is epidemic flu. Hopefully we are coming to the end of the pandemic - assuming new variants don't play stupid