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> doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same? Because we all decided to collectively forget every single thing we know about respiratory viruses and infe

> doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same? Because we all decided to collectively forget every single thing we know about respiratory viruses and infectious diseases. Somehow because covid is "novel" the world needed to rebuild our entire knowledge base from the ground up. A good example is how lasting t-cell immunity was dismissed for the longest time (and still is in many circles). People apparently seemed to think that this virus was so special and new that people would just keep getting it over and over again every six months or something. Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this? If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago.... Labeling it as "novel" let people just ignore common friggen sense and completely loose the plot.

johnchristopher 5y ago
> If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago.... But it's only recently (~50-100 years) that we travel around the world so much, would covid-19 have propagated like it's doing now 300 or 2000 years ago ?
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  I can't edit but in the mean time I have been reading a bit of the Wikipedia page about the black plague in Europe and a world less connected than ours still can burn from a fast spreading virus. And there's been plague outbursts in recent years.
Gibbon1 5y ago
What was interesting to me is if you went back and read up on how various childhood disease worked. Nothing about Covid would surprise or confuse you. And one would not be blase about just letting it rip.
yread 5y ago
But... we did get infected with coronaviruses (the OC43 and friends) and other common cold viruses over and over again. The reinfection rate of ~15% for SARS-COV-2 is comparable to those
- legolas2412 5y ago
  It would have been better if reinfection was described as "you'll test positive again, but it will be milder". Instead the media was full of articles saying "immunity lasts only 6 months"
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    “There is just so much we don’t understand about this virus”. Yeah. No. It’s a respiratory virus that is pretty nasty in really old people but not so much in anybody else.
ianlevesque 5y ago
Like forgetting that respiratory viruses are airborne?
lazyasciiart 5y ago
> Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this? Yes. The common cold is a set of symptoms that are caused by many things, but a majority of instances are caused by rhinovirus. It is possible for people to be infected by the same strain multiple times, but more importantly there are over 100 variations they can catch, and previous infections from one variation do not protect against another. The worst case scenario for covid was exactly that.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago.... But it's only recently (~50-100 years) that we travel around the world so much, would covid-19 have propagated like it's doing now 300 or 2000 years ago ?

johnchristopher 5y ago
I can't edit but in the mean time I have been reading a bit of the Wikipedia page about the black plague in Europe and a world less connected than ours still can burn from a fast spreading virus. And there's been plague outbursts in recent years.

Gibbon1 5y ago

What was interesting to me is if you went back and read up on how various childhood disease worked. Nothing about Covid would surprise or confuse you. And one would not be blase about just letting it rip.

yread 5y ago

But... we did get infected with coronaviruses (the OC43 and friends) and other common cold viruses over and over again. The reinfection rate of ~15% for SARS-COV-2 is comparable to those

legolas2412 5y ago
It would have been better if reinfection was described as "you'll test positive again, but it will be milder". Instead the media was full of articles saying "immunity lasts only 6 months"
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  “There is just so much we don’t understand about this virus”. Yeah. No. It’s a respiratory virus that is pretty nasty in really old people but not so much in anybody else.

ianlevesque 5y ago

Like forgetting that respiratory viruses are airborne?

lazyasciiart 5y ago

> Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this? Yes. The common cold is a set of symptoms that are caused by many things, but a majority of instances are caused by rhinovirus. It is possible for people to be infected by the same strain multiple times, but more importantly there are over 100 variations they can catch, and previous infections from one variation do not protect against another. The worst case scenario for covid was exactly that.