68 ms·

The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

773 points by prostoalex 5y ago

JackPoach 5y ago
Though coronavirus is very different in many respects, it's worthwhile (especially if you are older like me) to remember the history of AIDS. We've learned to live with it and limit its spread very effectively in the western world.
- js8 5y ago
  Yeah, we learned to limit its spread, but with "masks" (condoms).
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    Condoms have a 99.9% effectiveness. Studies have shown that face mask policies have around a 1% effectiveness.
    - smallerfish 5y ago
      What studies?
      - Expirat 5y ago
        Do you need a study to understand that a latex condom can catch infected seminal fluids while a cloth mask cannot stop the spread of droplets, or aerosols containing covid?
        valeness 5y ago
        yes
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        erhk 5y ago
        A cloth mask does reduce the spread of aerlsols as well as droplets. Anything telling you otherwise is false and i will happily bury you in a dozen backing studies.
        nickthemagicman 5y ago
        It's clear masks stop droplets. That's not in question. It's clear masks work for healthcare workers who are trained in their use. But is wearing a filthy rag until the waiter brings the breadsticks an effective community mask policy?
        Expirat 5y ago
        No it doesn't. The last year and a half is proof that masks played no significant role in reduction of infections. Bringing all kinds of studies doesn't prove anything since we effectively had the chance to witnesss the biggest study of all. Sure, it might stop some droplets. But a mask can never be as effective as a condom in stopping the virus. It s common sense. You can still infect or get infected. And that s the issue.
    - gruez 5y ago
      That's comparing apples and oranges because you're comparing the effectiveness of a particular treatment (condoms) with the effectiveness of a particular policy (mask mandates).
    - joshuaissac 5y ago
      According to this study by the University of Cambridge, FFP3 masks provided "31-100% protection (and most likely 100%)": https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-respirators-protect-healthcare-workers-against-infection-with-sars-cov-2?commit=e567e67501cd6ee0dd1a6e8e4acdf2c4fd70e0ec https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-r... (preprint).
      - nickthemagicman 5y ago
        Face mask policies on a community level. Not with trained healthcare workers.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    Not sure you can call it limiting the spread. We slow the spread. Which potentially prevents overrunning our hospital. It seems like eventually everyone is going to get it. Slowing the spread also deepens the chain of infections and may lead to more mutation.
- Bostonian 5y ago
  AIDS never spread broadly among heterosexuals who did not share needles or have partners who are bisexual or shared needles. Everyone is at risk for covid, like the flu.
  - evgen 5y ago
    Spoken like someone whose knowledge of the world ends at the US border. Hate to be the bearer of unpleasant news, but there are parts of the world where HIV was mostly a heterosexual disease. The nature of the main infected population depended upon how HIV was first introduced a country and what cultural behaviors helped or hindered its spread.
    - NoPie 5y ago
      Even in Eastern Europe currently most HIV transmissions happen with heterosexuals. I was surprised to learn that in the Western countries it is mostly spread by MSM (men having sex with men) and IDU (intravenous drug use).
  - cmsefton 5y ago
    This certainly was not the experience of other countries such as South Africa where the majority of transfer (roughly 80%) was via heterosexual transfer.
    - joshuaissac 5y ago
      Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8420583/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8420583/
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      I'll do a PSA here for younger people since I've followed AIDS since the beginning of news reports in the 1980s: - In Africa, men using hookers is a common status thing. So heterosexual men get it from hookers and take it home to their wives. - If you look at the links in this thread, you can see that black Americans are around 5x more likely to get HIV than other US groups. Mostly this is an aversion to condoms for several cultural reasons. - This may sound surprising to men who are well-read, but American women (and others) often don't use or demand condoms. You'd be amazed at how little they're actually used. I expect an epidemic of infertility and STDs as women's partner count for all groups climbs above 100 each (thanks, Tindr.) If you're in the US and need larger condoms, most chains carry the brand-name "Magnum." The California Family court is awarding $2,000+/month to baby mamas from engineers, so wrap it up, guys.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-and-new-cases-of-hiv?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-and-new-cases-of-h... HIV deaths were 348k in 1990 (which is the earliest year I found stats for on a quick googling). Around 4m people died from covid over the past year. We definitely would not want covid's mortality trajectory to follow HIV's, which peaked at 1.95 million, a 5.5x multiple of 1990's figure.
4e530344963049 5y ago
https://trimread.org/articles/352 https://trimread.org/articles/352
xyzzy21 5y ago
Yes. And it will evolve into a fairly benign endemic virus just like its cousin: the common cold coronavirus.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  How do you know? HIV hasn't evolved to be any less deadly in the 40 years it has been around. Instead, there's most excellent treatment available and people have changed their behaviour.
  - oblio 5y ago
    We'll probably do a bunch of these. Vaccines, treatment for the worst symptoms and potentially treatment against the virus itself. I think we're working on all these fronts. I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much.
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much. I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's known that immunity against coronaviruses isn't long-lasting (look at the Rev Jackson and his wife, both of whom were vaccinated early this year and are now in hospital) and that antiviral treatment needs to start early (does everyone really want to do a PCR test every other day so they can start antibody treatment early like Governor Abbot?) We'll have to start wearing masks indoor and stop being in crowded rooms until the virus is eradicated. Right now, with the population half vaccinated, we are setting ourselves up for a re-run of Marek's disease, this time in people.
      - oblio 5y ago
        What we should do and what we'll do will be very different. 5 years of reduced socialization will turn a large percentage of the population into nervous wrecks.
      - 5y ago
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
"The coronavirus"? News to me. There isn't a "the".
- msoad 5y ago
  maybe because you didn't read the article? This is not about COVID-19 specifically.
cm2187 5y ago
That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK. There isn't really a next step after having vaccinated the population, it is "steady state". So do they want us to have these restrictions (countries you can't travel to, endless testing, mask requirements) forever?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  In the case of the U.K., it's the population (not the government) that is holding things back. My impression is that Boris Johnson is opening things up as fast as he thinks he can get away with, without an enormous backlash that gets him removed from office. Unlike, say, France where the positions of government and popular backlash are reversed.
  - nly 5y ago
    Boris isn't in danger. He got what he always wanted - to be a wartime PM
- celticninja 5y ago
  What restrictions do you mean? I am in the UK and facing no restrictions in daily life.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    No restriction? You will have a nasty surprise if you return from a red list country. Plus mandatory covid tests before and after returning to the UK. Plus mandatory face masks in public transports. Plus mandatory self-quarantine if you are pinged by the NHS app. Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal.
    - luffapi 5y ago
      > Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal. This is the new normal (thankfully). Government regulations or not, management will not be able to force people back in the office. Office culture was a quirk of the 20th century. A halfway house between the assembly line and the internet. Covid just forced its inevitable collapse.
ianai 5y ago
Wow, no mention of long covid in the entire article. People are making a lot of assumptions about a disease with billions of people naive to it (the unvaccinated) and selective pressure from the vaccinated. I think we could all benefit from some humility.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  > "“A big question mark there is long COVID,” says Yonatan Grad, an immunologist and infectious-disease researcher at Harvard. There are still no data to prove how well the vaccines prevent long COVID, but experts generally agree that a vaccinated immune system is better prepared to fight off the virus without doing collateral damage."
  - ianai 5y ago
    I did miss that. I still think humility and caution are warranted. The preliminary numbers for long covid in breakthrough infections were similar to the unvaccinated in the Israel report, for instance.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Good article, but doesn't mention the other reason that covid-19 is never going completely away: animal reservoirs. We know that dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, white-tailed deer, a gorilla, and a tiger have been found to have been infected with covid-19. It is implausible that it will ever cease to have an animal reservoir, especially given the finding in Canada of 30% of white-tailed deer having it. Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs, I don't believe there is any case of eliminating it. But, like vaccines can teach the immune system how to respond more intelligently (and less self-destructively) to covid-19, hopefully society can learn to respond more intelligently, and less self-destructively, to the fact that it's always in circulation.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  How does covid transmit to wild animals like deer that have almost no interactions with humans ? The transmission chain must be very long. I'd appreciate any links or resources to read more. Perhaps we can learn to be more mindful of our interactions with other animals, wear masks in public spaces or public transport, and hopefully WFH becomes a permanent option. It seems that I stepped on many nerves, please, feel free to disagree or argue.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > How does covid transmit to wild animals like deer that have almost no interactions with humans ? I've been within a few feet of wild deer plenty of times in my life. Humans have a lot more interaction with wild animals than you would think once you move outside of urban areas.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      There's literally a market in Brian Head Utah where a bull moose hangs out on the front porch most of the day. I'm sure there are plenty of "wild" animals with petting-zoo-like relationships with random people. This can't be the only one.
alphager 5y ago
> close to full vaccination, like the UK. Why do people not consider kids younger than 12yo as part of the population? MILLIONS of kids can't be vaccinated yet (but will hopefully come december). Any talk of lifting restrictions before march is basically a re-formulated "fuck the kids".
- colordrops 5y ago
  No it's not. There's still no evidence that there is any real risk to children. Please prove otherwise. Anecdotes and one in a million cases don't count.
  - jcrben 5y ago
    Nearly 300 hospitalized per day, nearly 500 dead so far. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/07/health/children-covid-19-protection/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/07/health/children-covid-19-prot... Unknown how many will long-term health effects. Even seemingly innocuous viruses like Epstein-Barr are tied to various health problems later in life. Why should we knowingly expose an entire generation to a little understood virus?
    - colordrops 5y ago
      So less than one in a million children hospitalized per day. And 500 dead after almost two years is nothing, sorry to be so blunt. You can say epstein-barr, I can say other corona viruses like the cold virus. You can't just choose an arbitrary virus to compare to. We need strong evidence of serious risk to impose such restrictions, and not ungrounded fear which is not backed by data.
      - Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
        Fear mongers run out of ammunition for forever lockdowns. Low quality of arguments will be compensated by hysteria and insults. For instance that you don't care about children (while in their age group it's less harmful than a flu).
User23 5y ago
What baffles me is the total failure to highlight one of the best ways to mitigate the risk of severe covid complications: don’t be obese[1]. It’s also a good life choice for those who also prefer not to die of non-covid conditions. Edit: And it increases your risk for long covid[2]. [1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/latest-evidence-on-obesity-and-covid-19#The-evidence-so-far https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/latest-evidence-on... [2] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210608/obesity-increases-risk-of-long-covid-study-finds https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210608/obesity-increases-r...
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  The, uh, tone of your comment suggests that there is this epidemic of obese people who simply have neglected to press the STOP BEING OBESE button. "All you have to do is ..." "Can't you just ..." In technology, we hate hearing that from people who do not have a grasp of the situation -- why are you doing it here? That button doesn't exist. That's the source of your bafflement.
  - hnuser847 5y ago
    Perhaps we should have nutrition passports. People wouldn’t be allowed to visit fast food restaurants until they have sub-30 BMI.
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      If I could short stock in this idea, well, it would be like getting in early on crypto.
  - president 5y ago
    You could same about "Can't you just take the jab?" and "Can't you just wear a mask?". If you want to be the one deciding who has to do something, then that's called authoritarianism and it's the reason why so many people are pissed off about the all of the covid restrictions.
- greedo 5y ago
somewhatbetter 5y ago
Thanks to god for covid i don't have to return to the office. It is a small price the humanity have to pay for that, so it is ok.
- sdze 5y ago
  I feel you.
- erhk 5y ago
  Ill happily find you a remote job pre covid to undo all this
74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
who even cares? many bad things are here forever ... why is this such a shock to many people - I don't get it.
- tpaulin 5y ago
  The Plague is one good example: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html
- WhompingWindows 5y ago
  "Who even cares?" It takes empathy-blinders to not see this. Think of all the people whose livelihoods were incredibly damaged by Coronavirus: the children whose parents died alone in an ICU and no one was allowed to see them; the young fathers who couldn't be with their wife as she gives birth; the millions who lost jobs; the thousands upon thousands of businesses and cultural events ended. This is a material worsening of society and our economy, that's why people care. Do you even care about the happiness and health of fellow humans?
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
    If N is the number of endemic pathogens before Corona then we have now N+1. It's not a question about empathy but about realism, pal.
joelbondurant 5y ago
If you wore 7 masks to sleep, coronavirus would become extinct in 2 weeks. - Math Illiterate Diaper Face Communists
creamynebula 5y ago
Specially given that after a year and a half we still don't seem to ponder that livestock, hunting, deforestation, and all sorts of animal experimenting mean another deadly disease could slip up anytime as it just did.
- erhk 5y ago
  Deforestation is relevant here? What are you on about
  - jpeloquin 5y ago
    "anthropized environments can provide an acceptable habitat for a large range of bat species, generating thus a higher diversity of bats and in turn of bat-borne viruses next to human dwellings … This increases the risk of transmission of viruses through direct contact, domestic animal infection, or contamination by urine or feces." [0] "Deforestation has also been associated with the increased emergence of viral pathogens, such as SARS, Ebola and other viruses of bats." [1] The conclusions of the first paper (from April 2018) seem prophetic in hindsight: "The risk of emergence of a novel bat-CoV disease can therefore be envisioned." [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5904276/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5904276/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829318/
  - WhompingWindows 5y ago
    I believe the premise is that close contact with nature may lead to species-hopping viruses transmitting to us. Combine that with bats like to live on human structures, double whammy. Bats are highly social and create breeding-grounds for tons of pathogens.
- xdennis 5y ago
  I don't think it's clear that the origins of covid are natural. This has become less controversial recently.
  - creamynebula 5y ago
at_a_remove 5y ago
It will be interesting to see if this will mutate into less harmful variants, or, with vaccines go the way of Marek's disease, and become more lethal. This is a fascinating global experiment that will determine our policy for decades either way. Personally, the first thing I did when I heard that a vaccine was coming was try to find out if it was "leaky" or not. I could not find this information. We ought to be hustling on a non-leaky version, and perhaps that will be the policy lesson learned.
- thisiscorrect 5y ago
  Wasn't the lethality of Marek's disease for poultry driven by immune escape from vaccination?
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    It was the leakiness that drove it, from what I read.
goda90 5y ago
I really hope we take this as a call to put more research into effective and affordable antiviral treatment. Vaccines are great, but there is always a limitation. Better antivirals could save a lot of lives, especially early in a pandemic.
- gurleen_s 5y ago
  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
  - helloworld11 5y ago
    With COVID we had a ton of wildly hysterical, panicked, vacillated prevention attempts still requiring a ton of cure
skadamou 5y ago
Does anyone know of any resources that talk about how endemic COVID might look for immune-compromised folks? I recognize there probably just isn't the research yet to make too many claims about how this disease effects people on immune-supressing drugs but I have found vanishingly little on the web that even takes a stab at what life should look like for those folks in the long run. This is a rare Atlantic article that I think takes a level-headed and nuanced approach to a topic that requires some level of technical understanding. I tip my hat to Sarah Zhang.
- gpt5 5y ago
  Here is a study specifically on immunocompromised people: https://www.timesofisrael.com/3rd-covid-shot-highly-potent-in-israels-immunocompromised-early-study-shows/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/3rd-covid-shot-highly-potent-i...
corona-research 5y ago
Corona is dystopian fascism.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kirillzubovsky 5y ago
Finally a thoughtful truthful article on the topic. It’s a year too late, but better now than never. It’s time to accept the reality and move past the hysteria.
- jimmyjazz14 5y ago
  Weirdly back before everyone went full panic mode the Atlantic published a somewhat similar article https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vac... It was actually the first thing I ever really read about covid and shaped a lot of my views early on in the pandemic, largely inoculating me from going full panic mode.
dang 5y ago
To read all the 15000+ comments in this thread you need to click More at the bottom or on links like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=5 (Comments like this will eventually go away. Sorry for the annoyance. The server is hurting today.)
resource0x 5y ago
I have an idea: can someone write a script to compare current covid cases among countries as a function of vaccination rates. Same for deaths/1 miliion population. I don't have skills for that, but this is HN after all, so there should be someone... (One of the parameters should be a timeline of vaccinations - vaccines tend to wane over time, we have a chance to figure out to what extent).
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > can someone write a script to compare current covid cases among countries as a function of vaccination rates This isn't really a good idea, because cases as a function of vaccination rates won't tell you anything meaningful. Vaccinations aren't distributed at random - they are heavily skewed towards people at risk of serious health effects from the virus, and skewed away from people with low risk. So if you were to tabulate that data, you'd be hopelessly confounded by the differing population structures among different countries.
  - resource0x 5y ago
    So, there's no way to figure out the effectiveness of vaccines from the data? Then how?
    - mmcdermott 5y ago
      It would have to be a multivariate analysis. That's sort of the problem with x over y analysis - the question presupposes a very narrow range of answers. There are good reasons to believe the vaccines help, but you don't want to beg the question when you start the analysis.
      - resource0x 5y ago
        > you might have heard about studies from Israel claiming that vaccine efficacy has dropped by some 60% Yes, I heard it. 60% is not a constant, the effectiveness keeps dropping over time. So what gives? In country A, everybody has to take a vaccine every 5-6 months with lockdowns in between, while another country doesn't bother vaccinating, and life returns to normal? Is this what you expect from the vaccine?
beloch 5y ago
"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earlier this summer is any indication, this transition to endemicity might be psychologically rocky." Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist. Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. We, the natives of that village, have vaccines and advanced medical care in finite quantities, plus a better understanding of how to reduce transmission rates. That's gone a long way to soften the blow. The transition from pandemic to endemic usually kills a lot more people in a given area, and the area effected right now is everywhere. The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic. Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. Until we've built up immunity to several different strains of COVID-19, every new strain has the potential to overwhelm our medical systems, and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility. It's not as simple as flipping a switch from "life threatening pandemic" to "quotidian endemic". There are shades of grey in between that cause varying strain on hospital ICU's, and the transition isn't one-way. Our village will be hit far less hard if we behave intelligently about disease prevention. Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
- linuxftw 5y ago
  > such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts Never happened. Almost nobody ever died of chicken pox. Fear mongering like this is exactly why nobody trusts the CDC and FDA. It's all quackery.
  - rednerrus 5y ago
    What's all quackery?
asadkn 5y ago
Wouldn't it be better, then, at this point, to focus on hospitalization numbers rather than infections or deaths alone. As vaccines have been, reportedly, very good at preventing hospitalizations. It doesn't matter if there's 1 death, if hundreds are being hospitalized per day, overflowing the health care system. The problem isn't just mortality rate of covid-19 itself, it's also how hospitals are other treatments are affected. You better hope you don't get sick when the health care system is overloaded or at capacity.
autokad 5y ago
There is lots of competition for the top of the stupidity list. NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu season, really? Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity. or the fact people still want to lock down despite how epically they have failed. Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America. To no fault of their own, they are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the US sharing a border with them the way it is meant no rosy outcome was in our future. Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science. Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? if we had to lock down because of lack of hospital beds, well we better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds, like real soon. This is why the lockdowns should have came at a price, you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdown, we need timely updates on your progress to that metric, and we need an action plan such that this will never happen again (such as building more hosptials - hey, how about just opening the thousands we shut down in the last 5 years to make hospitals more profitable!). my views on that were called 'myopic'. so we gave them lockdowns without restrictions, and nothing was done. here we are in the same situation, odd. As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed. edit: just to be clear - I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. There is unrefutably evidence the vaccine prevents sever cases.
- throwawayzz007 5y ago
  Hospital bed / ICU capacity is really just Hollywood accounting. They can prepare for surges and make more meds. There are federal and local incentives that get handed out to hospitals that are at or near capacity. So they’re always at or near capacity.
deleted 5y ago
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tehjoker 5y ago
I like how the mainstream media is on a "live with the virus" blitz while Delta counts soar.
tamaharbor 5y ago
Frankly, from the tone of these comments, it appears we don’t know anything for sure.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ttobbaybbob 5y ago
It will be interesting to understand the long-term impact of covid on immunity. Given that covid came from GoF research have we developed defenses (albeit at an ultimately very-high price) that will protect us from future novel coronaviruses ? other classes of virus? (ie how the plague resistance in those of european descent gives some level of protection against hiv [0]) Is this something we have a way to measure or will it be impossible to tell once everyone in the world has some amount of covid immunity? 0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h... (first thing i could find)
- frakkingcylons 5y ago
  While the lab escape theory is possible, there’s definitely not enough evidence to just state it like it’s fact (as you just did).
dongping 5y ago
Nonpharmaceutical interventions do work. With Internet and E-commerce, full scale lockdown becomes tenable. Together with mass PCR testing, the virus can be eradicated. The virus can't teleport, and it is here to stay only because the decision-makers thought that it was the cheaper option to let it spread (it is not), then didn't want to admit being wrong. It is sad to see that with all the technologies available, the world is still in the middle of the pandemic.
- grillvogel 5y ago
  permanent lockdown should be encouraged because we have the internet and can buy stuff online? sorry but no.
  - dongping 5y ago
    Either we do a full lockdown to reach zero COVID, like NZ and China did (while buying stuff online), or we would have to do prolonged mockdowns like in Europe. The Chinese have been living a mostly normal life (albeit with limited foreign travel possibilities, and sporadic lockdowns in isolated locations) for a year.
    - grillvogel 5y ago
      zero covid is unrealistic. how are things gonna pan out when the hypothetical zero covid nation opens up to outside travelers?
      - dongping 5y ago
        I would argue that opening up is unrealistic. How are things going to pan out, when we apply selection pressure to the virus, while letting the virus sieve through the whole human population, creating dangerous variants due to our leaky vaccines? [1] I would have had agreed with you if we had a sterilizing vaccine that would help us to reach herd immunity. But we don't. Those travels which cannot afford 14 days quarantines, are non-essential travels. We fortunately have internet and the possibility to do remote meetings. The only thing missing is tourism, though. That's sad, but better travel locally than killing people. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vac...
theknocker 5y ago
>everything the media has been telling you this entire time was a big lie to manage hospital capacity without tanking the economy
pixel_tracing 5y ago
So work from home is going to last longer then?
- typest 5y ago
  I think the answer is yes. Most of the people setting the remote work/in office policies seemed to be thinking that vaccines offered a path back to normalcy. Delta seems to have blown that idea out of the water. It is possible that in the endemic covid world, there always remains a significant health risk due to breakthrough cases, especially for folks who are older or have comorbidities. Given that, it seems employers may face difficulty mandating people to work in person.
dpweb 5y ago
The only things pushed were masks and vaccines. Nothing about Vitamin D (or C for that matter) supplementation. No push for healthy lifestyles or reduction of obesity rate. Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies. Nothing about the use of UV light safe to stand in that kills virus. Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors. We should have had a full-court press in all areas to fight this virus. Not just a $100 billion for big pharma for a vaccine that always works, except when it doesn't. It's no wonder 25% of the US have adopted the idiotic position that they wont accept a mask or vaccine. People are so done with the 'new normal' for this week that just needs to be accepted.
- nomel 5y ago
  > No push for healthy lifestyles or reduction of obesity rate. Obese and unhealthy people won't become healthy if you ask the nicely. It's requires a lifestyle change. > Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies. Not even a simple lifestyle change like putting some cloth over your face is being tolerated. > Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors. And many things that would help would be at an fairly incredible financial cost (~$2 billion to cover schools, at an incredibly unrealistic $15k/school), or impossible (most local climates do not allow for comfortably staying outdoors all day).
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> The server is hurting today I get the tech hipster ethos that it's cool to just run one big ass server and supposedly avoid a lot of complexity cost. But it's the year two-thousand and twenty-one. The fact that the most well-known tech forum in the world either can't or won't set up autoscaling is an indictment of the entire tech industry. We're living in the binary age, but we still need humans to push the bits around by hand, like 1960's operators juggling wires on a switchboard.
websites2023 5y ago
That this article is even necessary proves that our leadership in the west has utterly failed to convey the goal of Coronavirus suppression tactics. Either that, or the sensible message is being morphed, funhouse mirror style, even through the most banal of media outlets. COVID-19 in some form was always going to be around forever. The goal was never complete eradication. Perhaps the miracle of the mRNA vaccine led us to fantasize, a little too openly, about going back to the pre-pandemic status quo. But that was never going to be the case. Personally, I’ve already moved on. I’ll wear a mask as the situation dictates. I’ll get the boosters. I’ll keep mailing in my nasal tests twice a week and check the results. I’ll keep an eye on the hospital numbers and modify my risky behavior as needed. I won’t argue with people about the mask, about vaccines, about the origins. I’ll work from home as long as they’ll let me and go into the office when they say I’ve got to — or I’ll find another job. I’ve already made peace with this thing. I’ve moved on. If I get it, I get it — but there’s no real use in obsessing over it any longer. I’ve adapted, and I’m ok with that.
gHosts 5y ago
> It will feel strange for a while and then it will not. It will be normal. Except for the people who, in addition to those who die year after year after year from flu, now die will die from Covid. For them it won't feel normal at all.
habosa 5y ago
At this point we almost know too much about the spread of this disease. Never in history have we tested so much for one thing. Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything. This is probably the first time in history that the whole world has the same scary thing as their front-page news. It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === danger. I am sure there are many thousands of cases of many other diseases in my community right now that I will never know or care about. I'm not trying to detract at all from the seriousness of the pandemic, just saying that going forward we'll have to pay a lot less attention to covid-19 if we want to have mental space for anything else.
- burlesona 5y ago
  I don’t know if that’s true. Case in point, the reason that Florida is drowning in COVID right now is that the majority of people there don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the same thing and many other parts of the country. There are still a lot of people who are freaked out, but most ordinary people are starting to tune out the news and lose interest because the media calls to be scared and panic just make them numb eventually.
  - twodave 5y ago
    I appreciate you sugar-coating it since I live there, but it's a bit worse than that. I live in Jacksonville. Of my friends, family and other connections there are just a few buckets people fall into: the informed, the purposefully-ignorant, and the idiots. Sadly, we've learned through the last year or so that many of our friends are actually idiots. That's been tough.
    - boldpandabear 5y ago
      They feel the same about you I’m sure.
    - logicchains 5y ago
      >that many of our friends are actually idiots. You think they're idiots, and they probably think you're a totalitarian coward.
pyuser583 5y ago
Well, shit.
unknownOrigin 5y ago
I don't know what's the best way of dealing with it, but what I do know is that what's Australia's doing is a recipe of what to avoid doing. Whatever's the way forward, it can't be arresting people for being outside, tagging people's homes like they're lepers or something and building concentration camps for the forced relocation of the sick.
- WhompingWindows 5y ago
  "tagging people's homes like they're lepers or something and building concentration camps for the forced relocation of the sick" Are you sure you want to compare the current policy to building concentration camps?
m0zg 5y ago
It is surprisingly difficult to explain this even to otherwise intelligent people. Everyone has been so brainwashed by mass media's narrative of "stopping covid" that they don't see that even in January of 2020 it was already impossible to "stop" it in any meaningful way. And they're still talking about it today. The strategy, it seems to me, should be to vaccinate as many people as possible, and then, within 6 months of that curve flatlining somewhere at 85-90% just let 'er rip and get people to acquire long-lasting immunity from COVID itself, while they are still protected by vaccine antibodies. And those who decline the vaccine should be treated as adults, and allowed to take the risk, too. There can't be _that_ many of such people given that by CDCs own estimates 120M+ people in the US already had the disease [1]. We will all get it eventually. A year or two from now, we'll be getting it 2-3 times a year and it'll be totally normal. Masks or no masks, you are getting covid. But with a vax you have a much greater chance of suriving it. This should be the messaging, yet we get total incompetence and incoherence out of people who should know better. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
- Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
  I'm not saying there's some kind of grand conspiracy theory but there are people who benefit from states/country not being fully open. Let it rip announced today would mean the end of eviction moratorium.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    "Today" is probably too early. You have to message this well in advance so that people who want to get the vaccine but perhaps were holding out for the fall season could get it in time. I know a good number of folks like that myself. It'd also be great if we could, _after a year and a half_, actually scale up capacity for N95 masks as well, at least for people who can't take the vaccine for medical reasons, if not for everyone who wants them. The whole "fighting COVID" thing is 100% political at this point. If it wasn't, instead of requiring masks on a plane (stuffed like sardines in a can), we'd see TSA at least measure body temperature and look for symptoms. We'd see the same thing in grocery stores, hospitals, and other public places. Gavin Newsom wouldn't be dining unmasked at The French Laundry, and Barack Obama wouldn't call a 500+ person superspreader event. People who tell us to worry about COVID, as a rule, demonstrably aren't worried about it themselves. Fauci himself rips that mask off his face immediately after cameras turn off. So after I received the vaccine, I basically said "fuck it" and I'm not going to comply with anything anymore. Nor will I get any "booster" shots or whatever else they come up with. I will also not work with or for anyone who mandates any of this useless garbage.
andy_ppp 5y ago
Maybe it would be good to follow up the vaccine with a dose of COVID-19 a few weeks later. I’d say then there’s very little need for boosters and you’ll get a much more full spectrum immune response…
gonational 5y ago
The coronavirus will never end until people turn off their TV and MSM in general and start looking elsewhere for information. First, the elephant in the room... Ivermectin. Ivermectin, which has been on the market globally for like half a century, is 86% effective as a prophylactic against COVID-19 (aka a better vaccine than the "vaccines" themselves), is 72% effective in early treatment, and is 40% effective in late treatment[1]. Side effects most experience? Kills parasites, including scabies, and reduces systemic inflammation, including TNF. Because of the fear and hype surrounding COVID-19, there are thousands of folks out there who have been taking what is generally considered to be an annual dose... every week... for almost a year. I mean, we can basically just stop right there; right? We've got a safe and effective drug that reduces the risk of serious illness and death to almost zero, collectively demonstrated by the studies in the first reference (bottom). For real, just stop and consider this, and then consider whether it's even worth considering ANY other information. There is a literal cure that is also a prophylactic, and which is completely safe. What else can be said? But, I'll continue. So then, in the US, we've got recommendations, from the world's preeminent purveyor of disease information, to wear paper masks OUTSIDE IN THE SUN, masks that are known to cause cancer, and which reduce oxygen[2] and increase resting heart rate, and which are about as effective as using a chain link fence to stop mosquitoes (less, even). Then, the mRNA "vaccines", which are an experimental form of gene therapy, with less than 1 year's worth of data. A normal vaccine would undergo about 12x the study duration, and that's when we're using existing and proven technology; but for some reason, we're ok with 1/12 of the study period for a "vaccine" that is of an entirely new category. Then, we trap people in their houses, where disease is shown to thrive, without sunlight and without exercise. The only way this ever ends is for a majority of people to turn their TVs off for good, and to start using common sense. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and none of this is medical advice. 1. https://c19ivermectin.com/#prep https://c19ivermectin.com/#prep 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9610792/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9610792/ OR (bacterial disease enhancement) https://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/11/2/293 https://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/11/2/293 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18500410/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18500410/
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Cuckdowncels with ass on fire.
scotty79 5y ago
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v... It's a pre-print of a study that indicates that children born during the pandemic, but not (even immediately) before, have significant cognitive deficites. Authors attribute it to lockdowns (although they ruled out maternal stress) because pregnant mothers and newborns didn't have a postive test result or symptoms. But that might be because they were not tested at all (researchers didn't track them down to check for antibodies) and had asymptomatic infection. There's also an interesting correlation that poorer children had higher likelyhood of deficits, which might also indicate that deficits are possibly due to covid, because poorer people were more likely to get infected during the pandemic. So this research might hint that newborns (but not few months olds) are vulnerable to covid and the result is cognitive deficit. Which might mean that in 20 years we will have a crime wave similar than the one explained by lead hypothesis, that will last for as long as we don't feel like vaccinating newborns against covid.

773 points by prostoalex 5y ago

Though coronavirus is very different in many respects, it's worthwhile (especially if you are older like me) to remember the history of AIDS. We've learned to live with it and limit its spread very effectively in the western world.

js8 5y ago
Yeah, we learned to limit its spread, but with "masks" (condoms).
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Condoms have a 99.9% effectiveness. Studies have shown that face mask policies have around a 1% effectiveness.
  - smallerfish 5y ago
    What studies?
    - Expirat 5y ago
      Do you need a study to understand that a latex condom can catch infected seminal fluids while a cloth mask cannot stop the spread of droplets, or aerosols containing covid?
      - valeness 5y ago
        yes
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - erhk 5y ago
        A cloth mask does reduce the spread of aerlsols as well as droplets. Anything telling you otherwise is false and i will happily bury you in a dozen backing studies.
        nickthemagicman 5y ago
        It's clear masks stop droplets. That's not in question. It's clear masks work for healthcare workers who are trained in their use. But is wearing a filthy rag until the waiter brings the breadsticks an effective community mask policy?
        Expirat 5y ago
        No it doesn't. The last year and a half is proof that masks played no significant role in reduction of infections. Bringing all kinds of studies doesn't prove anything since we effectively had the chance to witnesss the biggest study of all. Sure, it might stop some droplets. But a mask can never be as effective as a condom in stopping the virus. It s common sense. You can still infect or get infected. And that s the issue.
  - gruez 5y ago
    That's comparing apples and oranges because you're comparing the effectiveness of a particular treatment (condoms) with the effectiveness of a particular policy (mask mandates).
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    According to this study by the University of Cambridge, FFP3 masks provided "31-100% protection (and most likely 100%)": https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-respirators-protect-healthcare-workers-against-infection-with-sars-cov-2?commit=e567e67501cd6ee0dd1a6e8e4acdf2c4fd70e0ec https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-r... (preprint).
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      Face mask policies on a community level. Not with trained healthcare workers.
- postalrat 5y ago
  Not sure you can call it limiting the spread. We slow the spread. Which potentially prevents overrunning our hospital. It seems like eventually everyone is going to get it. Slowing the spread also deepens the chain of infections and may lead to more mutation.
Bostonian 5y ago
AIDS never spread broadly among heterosexuals who did not share needles or have partners who are bisexual or shared needles. Everyone is at risk for covid, like the flu.
- evgen 5y ago
  Spoken like someone whose knowledge of the world ends at the US border. Hate to be the bearer of unpleasant news, but there are parts of the world where HIV was mostly a heterosexual disease. The nature of the main infected population depended upon how HIV was first introduced a country and what cultural behaviors helped or hindered its spread.
  - NoPie 5y ago
    Even in Eastern Europe currently most HIV transmissions happen with heterosexuals. I was surprised to learn that in the Western countries it is mostly spread by MSM (men having sex with men) and IDU (intravenous drug use).
- cmsefton 5y ago
  This certainly was not the experience of other countries such as South Africa where the majority of transfer (roughly 80%) was via heterosexual transfer.
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8420583/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8420583/
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    I'll do a PSA here for younger people since I've followed AIDS since the beginning of news reports in the 1980s: - In Africa, men using hookers is a common status thing. So heterosexual men get it from hookers and take it home to their wives. - If you look at the links in this thread, you can see that black Americans are around 5x more likely to get HIV than other US groups. Mostly this is an aversion to condoms for several cultural reasons. - This may sound surprising to men who are well-read, but American women (and others) often don't use or demand condoms. You'd be amazed at how little they're actually used. I expect an epidemic of infertility and STDs as women's partner count for all groups climbs above 100 each (thanks, Tindr.) If you're in the US and need larger condoms, most chains carry the brand-name "Magnum." The California Family court is awarding $2,000+/month to baby mamas from engineers, so wrap it up, guys.
smallerfish 5y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-and-new-cases-of-hiv?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-and-new-cases-of-h... HIV deaths were 348k in 1990 (which is the earliest year I found stats for on a quick googling). Around 4m people died from covid over the past year. We definitely would not want covid's mortality trajectory to follow HIV's, which peaked at 1.95 million, a 5.5x multiple of 1990's figure.

4e530344963049 5y ago

https://trimread.org/articles/352 https://trimread.org/articles/352

xyzzy21 5y ago

Yes. And it will evolve into a fairly benign endemic virus just like its cousin: the common cold coronavirus.

HarryHirsch 5y ago
How do you know? HIV hasn't evolved to be any less deadly in the 40 years it has been around. Instead, there's most excellent treatment available and people have changed their behaviour.
- oblio 5y ago
  We'll probably do a bunch of these. Vaccines, treatment for the worst symptoms and potentially treatment against the virus itself. I think we're working on all these fronts. I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much. I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's known that immunity against coronaviruses isn't long-lasting (look at the Rev Jackson and his wife, both of whom were vaccinated early this year and are now in hospital) and that antiviral treatment needs to start early (does everyone really want to do a PCR test every other day so they can start antibody treatment early like Governor Abbot?) We'll have to start wearing masks indoor and stop being in crowded rooms until the virus is eradicated. Right now, with the population half vaccinated, we are setting ourselves up for a re-run of Marek's disease, this time in people.
    - oblio 5y ago
      What we should do and what we'll do will be very different. 5 years of reduced socialization will turn a large percentage of the population into nervous wrecks.
    - 5y ago

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

"The coronavirus"? News to me. There isn't a "the".

msoad 5y ago
maybe because you didn't read the article? This is not about COVID-19 specifically.

cm2187 5y ago

That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK. There isn't really a next step after having vaccinated the population, it is "steady state". So do they want us to have these restrictions (countries you can't travel to, endless testing, mask requirements) forever?

rossdavidh 5y ago
In the case of the U.K., it's the population (not the government) that is holding things back. My impression is that Boris Johnson is opening things up as fast as he thinks he can get away with, without an enormous backlash that gets him removed from office. Unlike, say, France where the positions of government and popular backlash are reversed.
- nly 5y ago
  Boris isn't in danger. He got what he always wanted - to be a wartime PM
celticninja 5y ago
What restrictions do you mean? I am in the UK and facing no restrictions in daily life.
- cm2187 5y ago
  No restriction? You will have a nasty surprise if you return from a red list country. Plus mandatory covid tests before and after returning to the UK. Plus mandatory face masks in public transports. Plus mandatory self-quarantine if you are pinged by the NHS app. Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal.
  - luffapi 5y ago
    > Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal. This is the new normal (thankfully). Government regulations or not, management will not be able to force people back in the office. Office culture was a quirk of the 20th century. A halfway house between the assembly line and the internet. Covid just forced its inevitable collapse.

ianai 5y ago

Wow, no mention of long covid in the entire article. People are making a lot of assumptions about a disease with billions of people naive to it (the unvaccinated) and selective pressure from the vaccinated. I think we could all benefit from some humility.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
> "“A big question mark there is long COVID,” says Yonatan Grad, an immunologist and infectious-disease researcher at Harvard. There are still no data to prove how well the vaccines prevent long COVID, but experts generally agree that a vaccinated immune system is better prepared to fight off the virus without doing collateral damage."
- ianai 5y ago
  I did miss that. I still think humility and caution are warranted. The preliminary numbers for long covid in breakthrough infections were similar to the unvaccinated in the Israel report, for instance.

rossdavidh 5y ago

Good article, but doesn't mention the other reason that covid-19 is never going completely away: animal reservoirs. We know that dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, white-tailed deer, a gorilla, and a tiger have been found to have been infected with covid-19. It is implausible that it will ever cease to have an animal reservoir, especially given the finding in Canada of 30% of white-tailed deer having it. Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs, I don't believe there is any case of eliminating it. But, like vaccines can teach the immune system how to respond more intelligently (and less self-destructively) to covid-19, hopefully society can learn to respond more intelligently, and less self-destructively, to the fact that it's always in circulation.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
How does covid transmit to wild animals like deer that have almost no interactions with humans ? The transmission chain must be very long. I'd appreciate any links or resources to read more. Perhaps we can learn to be more mindful of our interactions with other animals, wear masks in public spaces or public transport, and hopefully WFH becomes a permanent option. It seems that I stepped on many nerves, please, feel free to disagree or argue.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > How does covid transmit to wild animals like deer that have almost no interactions with humans ? I've been within a few feet of wild deer plenty of times in my life. Humans have a lot more interaction with wild animals than you would think once you move outside of urban areas.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    There's literally a market in Brian Head Utah where a bull moose hangs out on the front porch most of the day. I'm sure there are plenty of "wild" animals with petting-zoo-like relationships with random people. This can't be the only one.

alphager 5y ago

> close to full vaccination, like the UK. Why do people not consider kids younger than 12yo as part of the population? MILLIONS of kids can't be vaccinated yet (but will hopefully come december). Any talk of lifting restrictions before march is basically a re-formulated "fuck the kids".

colordrops 5y ago
No it's not. There's still no evidence that there is any real risk to children. Please prove otherwise. Anecdotes and one in a million cases don't count.
- jcrben 5y ago
  Nearly 300 hospitalized per day, nearly 500 dead so far. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/07/health/children-covid-19-protection/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/07/health/children-covid-19-prot... Unknown how many will long-term health effects. Even seemingly innocuous viruses like Epstein-Barr are tied to various health problems later in life. Why should we knowingly expose an entire generation to a little understood virus?
  - colordrops 5y ago
    So less than one in a million children hospitalized per day. And 500 dead after almost two years is nothing, sorry to be so blunt. You can say epstein-barr, I can say other corona viruses like the cold virus. You can't just choose an arbitrary virus to compare to. We need strong evidence of serious risk to impose such restrictions, and not ungrounded fear which is not backed by data.
    - Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
      Fear mongers run out of ammunition for forever lockdowns. Low quality of arguments will be compensated by hysteria and insults. For instance that you don't care about children (while in their age group it's less harmful than a flu).

User23 5y ago

What baffles me is the total failure to highlight one of the best ways to mitigate the risk of severe covid complications: don’t be obese[1]. It’s also a good life choice for those who also prefer not to die of non-covid conditions. Edit: And it increases your risk for long covid[2]. [1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/latest-evidence-on-obesity-and-covid-19#The-evidence-so-far https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/latest-evidence-on... [2] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210608/obesity-increases-risk-of-long-covid-study-finds https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210608/obesity-increases-r...

at_a_remove 5y ago
The, uh, tone of your comment suggests that there is this epidemic of obese people who simply have neglected to press the STOP BEING OBESE button. "All you have to do is ..." "Can't you just ..." In technology, we hate hearing that from people who do not have a grasp of the situation -- why are you doing it here? That button doesn't exist. That's the source of your bafflement.
- hnuser847 5y ago
  Perhaps we should have nutrition passports. People wouldn’t be allowed to visit fast food restaurants until they have sub-30 BMI.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    If I could short stock in this idea, well, it would be like getting in early on crypto.
- president 5y ago
  You could same about "Can't you just take the jab?" and "Can't you just wear a mask?". If you want to be the one deciding who has to do something, then that's called authoritarianism and it's the reason why so many people are pissed off about the all of the covid restrictions.
greedo 5y ago

somewhatbetter 5y ago

Thanks to god for covid i don't have to return to the office. It is a small price the humanity have to pay for that, so it is ok.

sdze 5y ago
I feel you.
erhk 5y ago
Ill happily find you a remote job pre covid to undo all this

74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago

who even cares? many bad things are here forever ... why is this such a shock to many people - I don't get it.

tpaulin 5y ago
The Plague is one good example: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html
WhompingWindows 5y ago
"Who even cares?" It takes empathy-blinders to not see this. Think of all the people whose livelihoods were incredibly damaged by Coronavirus: the children whose parents died alone in an ICU and no one was allowed to see them; the young fathers who couldn't be with their wife as she gives birth; the millions who lost jobs; the thousands upon thousands of businesses and cultural events ended. This is a material worsening of society and our economy, that's why people care. Do you even care about the happiness and health of fellow humans?
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
  If N is the number of endemic pathogens before Corona then we have now N+1. It's not a question about empathy but about realism, pal.

joelbondurant 5y ago

If you wore 7 masks to sleep, coronavirus would become extinct in 2 weeks. - Math Illiterate Diaper Face Communists

creamynebula 5y ago

Specially given that after a year and a half we still don't seem to ponder that livestock, hunting, deforestation, and all sorts of animal experimenting mean another deadly disease could slip up anytime as it just did.

erhk 5y ago
Deforestation is relevant here? What are you on about
- jpeloquin 5y ago
  "anthropized environments can provide an acceptable habitat for a large range of bat species, generating thus a higher diversity of bats and in turn of bat-borne viruses next to human dwellings … This increases the risk of transmission of viruses through direct contact, domestic animal infection, or contamination by urine or feces." [0] "Deforestation has also been associated with the increased emergence of viral pathogens, such as SARS, Ebola and other viruses of bats." [1] The conclusions of the first paper (from April 2018) seem prophetic in hindsight: "The risk of emergence of a novel bat-CoV disease can therefore be envisioned." [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5904276/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5904276/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829318/
- WhompingWindows 5y ago
  I believe the premise is that close contact with nature may lead to species-hopping viruses transmitting to us. Combine that with bats like to live on human structures, double whammy. Bats are highly social and create breeding-grounds for tons of pathogens.
xdennis 5y ago
I don't think it's clear that the origins of covid are natural. This has become less controversial recently.
- creamynebula 5y ago

at_a_remove 5y ago

It will be interesting to see if this will mutate into less harmful variants, or, with vaccines go the way of Marek's disease, and become more lethal. This is a fascinating global experiment that will determine our policy for decades either way. Personally, the first thing I did when I heard that a vaccine was coming was try to find out if it was "leaky" or not. I could not find this information. We ought to be hustling on a non-leaky version, and perhaps that will be the policy lesson learned.

thisiscorrect 5y ago
Wasn't the lethality of Marek's disease for poultry driven by immune escape from vaccination?
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  It was the leakiness that drove it, from what I read.

goda90 5y ago

I really hope we take this as a call to put more research into effective and affordable antiviral treatment. Vaccines are great, but there is always a limitation. Better antivirals could save a lot of lives, especially early in a pandemic.

gurleen_s 5y ago
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
- helloworld11 5y ago
  With COVID we had a ton of wildly hysterical, panicked, vacillated prevention attempts still requiring a ton of cure

skadamou 5y ago

Does anyone know of any resources that talk about how endemic COVID might look for immune-compromised folks? I recognize there probably just isn't the research yet to make too many claims about how this disease effects people on immune-supressing drugs but I have found vanishingly little on the web that even takes a stab at what life should look like for those folks in the long run. This is a rare Atlantic article that I think takes a level-headed and nuanced approach to a topic that requires some level of technical understanding. I tip my hat to Sarah Zhang.

gpt5 5y ago
Here is a study specifically on immunocompromised people: https://www.timesofisrael.com/3rd-covid-shot-highly-potent-in-israels-immunocompromised-early-study-shows/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/3rd-covid-shot-highly-potent-i...

corona-research 5y ago

Corona is dystopian fascism.

deleted 5y ago

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kirillzubovsky 5y ago

Finally a thoughtful truthful article on the topic. It’s a year too late, but better now than never. It’s time to accept the reality and move past the hysteria.

jimmyjazz14 5y ago
Weirdly back before everyone went full panic mode the Atlantic published a somewhat similar article https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vac... It was actually the first thing I ever really read about covid and shaped a lot of my views early on in the pandemic, largely inoculating me from going full panic mode.

dang 5y ago

To read all the 15000+ comments in this thread you need to click More at the bottom or on links like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=5 (Comments like this will eventually go away. Sorry for the annoyance. The server is hurting today.)

resource0x 5y ago

I have an idea: can someone write a script to compare current covid cases among countries as a function of vaccination rates. Same for deaths/1 miliion population. I don't have skills for that, but this is HN after all, so there should be someone... (One of the parameters should be a timeline of vaccinations - vaccines tend to wane over time, we have a chance to figure out to what extent).

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> can someone write a script to compare current covid cases among countries as a function of vaccination rates This isn't really a good idea, because cases as a function of vaccination rates won't tell you anything meaningful. Vaccinations aren't distributed at random - they are heavily skewed towards people at risk of serious health effects from the virus, and skewed away from people with low risk. So if you were to tabulate that data, you'd be hopelessly confounded by the differing population structures among different countries.
- resource0x 5y ago
  So, there's no way to figure out the effectiveness of vaccines from the data? Then how?
  - mmcdermott 5y ago
    It would have to be a multivariate analysis. That's sort of the problem with x over y analysis - the question presupposes a very narrow range of answers. There are good reasons to believe the vaccines help, but you don't want to beg the question when you start the analysis.
    - resource0x 5y ago
      > you might have heard about studies from Israel claiming that vaccine efficacy has dropped by some 60% Yes, I heard it. 60% is not a constant, the effectiveness keeps dropping over time. So what gives? In country A, everybody has to take a vaccine every 5-6 months with lockdowns in between, while another country doesn't bother vaccinating, and life returns to normal? Is this what you expect from the vaccine?

beloch 5y ago

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earlier this summer is any indication, this transition to endemicity might be psychologically rocky." Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist. Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. We, the natives of that village, have vaccines and advanced medical care in finite quantities, plus a better understanding of how to reduce transmission rates. That's gone a long way to soften the blow. The transition from pandemic to endemic usually kills a lot more people in a given area, and the area effected right now is everywhere. The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic. Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. Until we've built up immunity to several different strains of COVID-19, every new strain has the potential to overwhelm our medical systems, and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility. It's not as simple as flipping a switch from "life threatening pandemic" to "quotidian endemic". There are shades of grey in between that cause varying strain on hospital ICU's, and the transition isn't one-way. Our village will be hit far less hard if we behave intelligently about disease prevention. Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

linuxftw 5y ago
> such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts Never happened. Almost nobody ever died of chicken pox. Fear mongering like this is exactly why nobody trusts the CDC and FDA. It's all quackery.
- rednerrus 5y ago
  What's all quackery?

asadkn 5y ago

Wouldn't it be better, then, at this point, to focus on hospitalization numbers rather than infections or deaths alone. As vaccines have been, reportedly, very good at preventing hospitalizations. It doesn't matter if there's 1 death, if hundreds are being hospitalized per day, overflowing the health care system. The problem isn't just mortality rate of covid-19 itself, it's also how hospitals are other treatments are affected. You better hope you don't get sick when the health care system is overloaded or at capacity.

autokad 5y ago

There is lots of competition for the top of the stupidity list. NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu season, really? Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity. or the fact people still want to lock down despite how epically they have failed. Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America. To no fault of their own, they are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the US sharing a border with them the way it is meant no rosy outcome was in our future. Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science. Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? if we had to lock down because of lack of hospital beds, well we better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds, like real soon. This is why the lockdowns should have came at a price, you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdown, we need timely updates on your progress to that metric, and we need an action plan such that this will never happen again (such as building more hosptials - hey, how about just opening the thousands we shut down in the last 5 years to make hospitals more profitable!). my views on that were called 'myopic'. so we gave them lockdowns without restrictions, and nothing was done. here we are in the same situation, odd. As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed. edit: just to be clear - I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. There is unrefutably evidence the vaccine prevents sever cases.

throwawayzz007 5y ago
Hospital bed / ICU capacity is really just Hollywood accounting. They can prepare for surges and make more meds. There are federal and local incentives that get handed out to hospitals that are at or near capacity. So they’re always at or near capacity.

deleted 5y ago

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tehjoker 5y ago

I like how the mainstream media is on a "live with the virus" blitz while Delta counts soar.

tamaharbor 5y ago

Frankly, from the tone of these comments, it appears we don’t know anything for sure.

deleted 5y ago

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ttobbaybbob 5y ago

It will be interesting to understand the long-term impact of covid on immunity. Given that covid came from GoF research have we developed defenses (albeit at an ultimately very-high price) that will protect us from future novel coronaviruses ? other classes of virus? (ie how the plague resistance in those of european descent gives some level of protection against hiv [0]) Is this something we have a way to measure or will it be impossible to tell once everyone in the world has some amount of covid immunity? 0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h... (first thing i could find)

frakkingcylons 5y ago
While the lab escape theory is possible, there’s definitely not enough evidence to just state it like it’s fact (as you just did).

dongping 5y ago

Nonpharmaceutical interventions do work. With Internet and E-commerce, full scale lockdown becomes tenable. Together with mass PCR testing, the virus can be eradicated. The virus can't teleport, and it is here to stay only because the decision-makers thought that it was the cheaper option to let it spread (it is not), then didn't want to admit being wrong. It is sad to see that with all the technologies available, the world is still in the middle of the pandemic.

grillvogel 5y ago
permanent lockdown should be encouraged because we have the internet and can buy stuff online? sorry but no.
- dongping 5y ago
  Either we do a full lockdown to reach zero COVID, like NZ and China did (while buying stuff online), or we would have to do prolonged mockdowns like in Europe. The Chinese have been living a mostly normal life (albeit with limited foreign travel possibilities, and sporadic lockdowns in isolated locations) for a year.
  - grillvogel 5y ago
    zero covid is unrealistic. how are things gonna pan out when the hypothetical zero covid nation opens up to outside travelers?
    - dongping 5y ago
      I would argue that opening up is unrealistic. How are things going to pan out, when we apply selection pressure to the virus, while letting the virus sieve through the whole human population, creating dangerous variants due to our leaky vaccines? [1] I would have had agreed with you if we had a sterilizing vaccine that would help us to reach herd immunity. But we don't. Those travels which cannot afford 14 days quarantines, are non-essential travels. We fortunately have internet and the possibility to do remote meetings. The only thing missing is tourism, though. That's sad, but better travel locally than killing people. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vac...

theknocker 5y ago

>everything the media has been telling you this entire time was a big lie to manage hospital capacity without tanking the economy

pixel_tracing 5y ago

So work from home is going to last longer then?

typest 5y ago
I think the answer is yes. Most of the people setting the remote work/in office policies seemed to be thinking that vaccines offered a path back to normalcy. Delta seems to have blown that idea out of the water. It is possible that in the endemic covid world, there always remains a significant health risk due to breakthrough cases, especially for folks who are older or have comorbidities. Given that, it seems employers may face difficulty mandating people to work in person.

dpweb 5y ago

The only things pushed were masks and vaccines. Nothing about Vitamin D (or C for that matter) supplementation. No push for healthy lifestyles or reduction of obesity rate. Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies. Nothing about the use of UV light safe to stand in that kills virus. Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors. We should have had a full-court press in all areas to fight this virus. Not just a $100 billion for big pharma for a vaccine that always works, except when it doesn't. It's no wonder 25% of the US have adopted the idiotic position that they wont accept a mask or vaccine. People are so done with the 'new normal' for this week that just needs to be accepted.

nomel 5y ago
> No push for healthy lifestyles or reduction of obesity rate. Obese and unhealthy people won't become healthy if you ask the nicely. It's requires a lifestyle change. > Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies. Not even a simple lifestyle change like putting some cloth over your face is being tolerated. > Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors. And many things that would help would be at an fairly incredible financial cost (~$2 billion to cover schools, at an incredibly unrealistic $15k/school), or impossible (most local climates do not allow for comfortably staying outdoors all day).

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

> The server is hurting today I get the tech hipster ethos that it's cool to just run one big ass server and supposedly avoid a lot of complexity cost. But it's the year two-thousand and twenty-one. The fact that the most well-known tech forum in the world either can't or won't set up autoscaling is an indictment of the entire tech industry. We're living in the binary age, but we still need humans to push the bits around by hand, like 1960's operators juggling wires on a switchboard.

websites2023 5y ago

That this article is even necessary proves that our leadership in the west has utterly failed to convey the goal of Coronavirus suppression tactics. Either that, or the sensible message is being morphed, funhouse mirror style, even through the most banal of media outlets. COVID-19 in some form was always going to be around forever. The goal was never complete eradication. Perhaps the miracle of the mRNA vaccine led us to fantasize, a little too openly, about going back to the pre-pandemic status quo. But that was never going to be the case. Personally, I’ve already moved on. I’ll wear a mask as the situation dictates. I’ll get the boosters. I’ll keep mailing in my nasal tests twice a week and check the results. I’ll keep an eye on the hospital numbers and modify my risky behavior as needed. I won’t argue with people about the mask, about vaccines, about the origins. I’ll work from home as long as they’ll let me and go into the office when they say I’ve got to — or I’ll find another job. I’ve already made peace with this thing. I’ve moved on. If I get it, I get it — but there’s no real use in obsessing over it any longer. I’ve adapted, and I’m ok with that.

gHosts 5y ago

> It will feel strange for a while and then it will not. It will be normal. Except for the people who, in addition to those who die year after year after year from flu, now die will die from Covid. For them it won't feel normal at all.

habosa 5y ago

At this point we almost know too much about the spread of this disease. Never in history have we tested so much for one thing. Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything. This is probably the first time in history that the whole world has the same scary thing as their front-page news. It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === danger. I am sure there are many thousands of cases of many other diseases in my community right now that I will never know or care about. I'm not trying to detract at all from the seriousness of the pandemic, just saying that going forward we'll have to pay a lot less attention to covid-19 if we want to have mental space for anything else.

burlesona 5y ago
I don’t know if that’s true. Case in point, the reason that Florida is drowning in COVID right now is that the majority of people there don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the same thing and many other parts of the country. There are still a lot of people who are freaked out, but most ordinary people are starting to tune out the news and lose interest because the media calls to be scared and panic just make them numb eventually.
- twodave 5y ago
  I appreciate you sugar-coating it since I live there, but it's a bit worse than that. I live in Jacksonville. Of my friends, family and other connections there are just a few buckets people fall into: the informed, the purposefully-ignorant, and the idiots. Sadly, we've learned through the last year or so that many of our friends are actually idiots. That's been tough.
  - boldpandabear 5y ago
    They feel the same about you I’m sure.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    >that many of our friends are actually idiots. You think they're idiots, and they probably think you're a totalitarian coward.

pyuser583 5y ago

Well, shit.

unknownOrigin 5y ago

I don't know what's the best way of dealing with it, but what I do know is that what's Australia's doing is a recipe of what to avoid doing. Whatever's the way forward, it can't be arresting people for being outside, tagging people's homes like they're lepers or something and building concentration camps for the forced relocation of the sick.

WhompingWindows 5y ago
"tagging people's homes like they're lepers or something and building concentration camps for the forced relocation of the sick" Are you sure you want to compare the current policy to building concentration camps?

m0zg 5y ago

It is surprisingly difficult to explain this even to otherwise intelligent people. Everyone has been so brainwashed by mass media's narrative of "stopping covid" that they don't see that even in January of 2020 it was already impossible to "stop" it in any meaningful way. And they're still talking about it today. The strategy, it seems to me, should be to vaccinate as many people as possible, and then, within 6 months of that curve flatlining somewhere at 85-90% just let 'er rip and get people to acquire long-lasting immunity from COVID itself, while they are still protected by vaccine antibodies. And those who decline the vaccine should be treated as adults, and allowed to take the risk, too. There can't be _that_ many of such people given that by CDCs own estimates 120M+ people in the US already had the disease [1]. We will all get it eventually. A year or two from now, we'll be getting it 2-3 times a year and it'll be totally normal. Masks or no masks, you are getting covid. But with a vax you have a much greater chance of suriving it. This should be the messaging, yet we get total incompetence and incoherence out of people who should know better. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
I'm not saying there's some kind of grand conspiracy theory but there are people who benefit from states/country not being fully open. Let it rip announced today would mean the end of eviction moratorium.
- m0zg 5y ago
  "Today" is probably too early. You have to message this well in advance so that people who want to get the vaccine but perhaps were holding out for the fall season could get it in time. I know a good number of folks like that myself. It'd also be great if we could, _after a year and a half_, actually scale up capacity for N95 masks as well, at least for people who can't take the vaccine for medical reasons, if not for everyone who wants them. The whole "fighting COVID" thing is 100% political at this point. If it wasn't, instead of requiring masks on a plane (stuffed like sardines in a can), we'd see TSA at least measure body temperature and look for symptoms. We'd see the same thing in grocery stores, hospitals, and other public places. Gavin Newsom wouldn't be dining unmasked at The French Laundry, and Barack Obama wouldn't call a 500+ person superspreader event. People who tell us to worry about COVID, as a rule, demonstrably aren't worried about it themselves. Fauci himself rips that mask off his face immediately after cameras turn off. So after I received the vaccine, I basically said "fuck it" and I'm not going to comply with anything anymore. Nor will I get any "booster" shots or whatever else they come up with. I will also not work with or for anyone who mandates any of this useless garbage.

andy_ppp 5y ago

Maybe it would be good to follow up the vaccine with a dose of COVID-19 a few weeks later. I’d say then there’s very little need for boosters and you’ll get a much more full spectrum immune response…

gonational 5y ago

The coronavirus will never end until people turn off their TV and MSM in general and start looking elsewhere for information. First, the elephant in the room... Ivermectin. Ivermectin, which has been on the market globally for like half a century, is 86% effective as a prophylactic against COVID-19 (aka a better vaccine than the "vaccines" themselves), is 72% effective in early treatment, and is 40% effective in late treatment[1]. Side effects most experience? Kills parasites, including scabies, and reduces systemic inflammation, including TNF. Because of the fear and hype surrounding COVID-19, there are thousands of folks out there who have been taking what is generally considered to be an annual dose... every week... for almost a year. I mean, we can basically just stop right there; right? We've got a safe and effective drug that reduces the risk of serious illness and death to almost zero, collectively demonstrated by the studies in the first reference (bottom). For real, just stop and consider this, and then consider whether it's even worth considering ANY other information. There is a literal cure that is also a prophylactic, and which is completely safe. What else can be said? But, I'll continue. So then, in the US, we've got recommendations, from the world's preeminent purveyor of disease information, to wear paper masks OUTSIDE IN THE SUN, masks that are known to cause cancer, and which reduce oxygen[2] and increase resting heart rate, and which are about as effective as using a chain link fence to stop mosquitoes (less, even). Then, the mRNA "vaccines", which are an experimental form of gene therapy, with less than 1 year's worth of data. A normal vaccine would undergo about 12x the study duration, and that's when we're using existing and proven technology; but for some reason, we're ok with 1/12 of the study period for a "vaccine" that is of an entirely new category. Then, we trap people in their houses, where disease is shown to thrive, without sunlight and without exercise. The only way this ever ends is for a majority of people to turn their TVs off for good, and to start using common sense. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and none of this is medical advice. 1. https://c19ivermectin.com/#prep https://c19ivermectin.com/#prep 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9610792/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9610792/ OR (bacterial disease enhancement) https://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/11/2/293 https://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/11/2/293 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18500410/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18500410/

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Cuckdowncels with ass on fire.

scotty79 5y ago

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v... It's a pre-print of a study that indicates that children born during the pandemic, but not (even immediately) before, have significant cognitive deficites. Authors attribute it to lockdowns (although they ruled out maternal stress) because pregnant mothers and newborns didn't have a postive test result or symptoms. But that might be because they were not tested at all (researchers didn't track them down to check for antibodies) and had asymptomatic infection. There's also an interesting correlation that poorer children had higher likelyhood of deficits, which might also indicate that deficits are possibly due to covid, because poorer people were more likely to get infected during the pandemic. So this research might hint that newborns (but not few months olds) are vulnerable to covid and the result is cognitive deficit. Which might mean that in 20 years we will have a crime wave similar than the one explained by lead hypothesis, that will last for as long as we don't feel like vaccinating newborns against covid.