28 ms·

"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

• 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?
  • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    > Fear mongering like this is exactly why nobody trusts the CDC and FDA. Do you believe beloch speaks for the CDC and FDA?
  • svachalek 5y ago
    According to wikipedia, it still kills 6400 per year.
  • javagram 5y ago
    What quackery? A quick google confirms that chickenpox has been speculated to have caused a serious epidemic among Native Americans. We know that European diseases wiped them out, it just isn’t necessarily clear which ones due to the lack of record keeping and medical knowledge at the time. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957993/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957993/ > In the years before English settlers established the Plymouth colony (1616–1619), most Native Americans living on the southeastern coast of present-day Massachusetts died from a mysterious disease. Classic explanations have included yellow fever, smallpox, and plague. Chickenpox and trichinosis are among more recent proposals. We suggest an additional candidate: leptospirosis complicated by Weil syndrome.
    • MatteoFrigo 5y ago
      Your case would be stronger if you linked an article that argues that chickenpox was the culprit. The article you quote suggests that the disease was leptospirosis.
  • eropple 5y ago
    This is a statement that cannot be substantiated with any confidence. In particular, the Native American side of the Columbian exchange saw massive body counts due to a mixture of diseases and my understanding is that chicken pox is among the suspects. It isn't "quackery" just because you don't like it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957993/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957993/ (edit: 'javagram got there first!)
• peakaboo 5y ago
  We have immunity, it's called the immune system.
  • AzzieElbab 5y ago
    but your immune system response is what is causing lethal symptoms
    • navjack27 5y ago
      And not having an immune response can turn you into a little mutation factory. https://www.biospace.com/article/south-african-hiv-patient-was-a-natural-laboratory-for-sars-cov-2-mutations/ https://www.biospace.com/article/south-african-hiv-patient-w... https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/10/21-1461_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/10/21-1461_article
  • seagullz 5y ago
    Ever heard of “cytokine storm”?
• SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  People will always be sceptical of deviations from the status quo and politicians will always be there to capitalize on those fears for substantial gains of power. We have the most educated populis in human history and we're still seeing these problems. I'm not sure how you could fix vaccines becoming a political issue without major changes to the political structure.
  • xadhominemx 5y ago
    Vaccine refusal has not become a major partisan political issue in any other country. It happened here because of the shameless cynicism of the Republican Party and aligned media apparatus.
    • Wohlf 5y ago
      The US isn't even the most anti-vaccine country in the developed world, that goes to France.
      • hadlock 5y ago
        Do you have a link to the most recent data? I recall The Netherlands having some severe resistance to masks etc, but I haven't seen a breakdown of vaccine uptake by country in recent months.
      • ithkuil 5y ago
        You can have a strong and vocal anti-vaccine population and yet not have a strong divide on party lines. One factor is that not all countries have such a strong two party system that polarizes every single thing.
      • xadhominemx 5y ago
        No, their single dose rate is already 10% higher than the US and increasing at a faster rate.
    • laurent92 5y ago
      Same in France: Macron, the entire government and their health advisors said the following: - Everyone should go to the opera/cinema to fight Covid (7th March 2020) - Lockdown for everybody (20th March) (I guess people caught it in the theaters…) - Masks are useless, absolutely useless for the general public (June 2020), - Masks are mandatory (September), - Blocking borders is useless, Covid will be here, - Borders blocked during Lockdown II and III, if I remember the dates, because it’s useful (so maybe we should have stopped the direct flights between WUHAN and Lyon earlier than September 2020?), - The idea of Passe Sanitaire (a generalized QR code suspending entrance in public buildings) is a conspiration theory (10th May 2021) - Passe Sanitaire mandatory on August 1st, live and enforced in all public places except offices, including outdoor restaurants and public transport. - Trust us this time, the vaccine is the right thing, - But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines, - Given they injected 10,000 patients with AIDS in 1989, and took 6 years to admit it, and press wasn’t under État d’Urgence Sanitaire at the time, (and also, they didn’t know that Benalla had kept and used 6 diplomatic passports after being fired, just to show how they work). If anything, they have taught us to doubt everything they say: They clearly didn’t know what they were doing, and did governance-by-lying.
• masklinn 5y ago
  > 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. You may be confusing chickenpox and smallpox? Chickenpox is generally considered a pretty mild disease (many countries still don't routinely vaccinate against it), and was so historically as the infectiousness ensured essentially everybody would be infected as a child. WHO guidelines are actually to only vaccinate if rates can be kept above 80% consistently, otherwise it'll likely hit older populations with much more dire consequences.
  • recursive 5y ago
    Chickenpox is mild in children. More severe in adults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenpox#Adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenpox#Adults If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood. If introduced in a new population, the consequences to adults would be much different.
    • masklinn 5y ago
      > If introduced in a new population Ah true, I had not considered that unlike eurasians american populations would obviously not have had it as children.
    • nkozyra 5y ago
      > If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood. Sort of. I got shingles (early 40s) this year. Completely knocked on my ass for a week and maybe 2-3 months to be mostly back to normal. I recommend the shingles vaccine to anyone who will listen.
      • waych 5y ago
        Did you get shingles shortly after getting a vaccine?
        • 5y ago
• johnnyanmac 5y ago
  > Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. Something tells me that this is just history repeating. The difference here is the same as your metaphor; the world is a village and now its much easier to see that one conspiracy nut every village has that gets outcasted. The problem of course is that now those nuts can band together in the thousands thanks to worldwide communication and argue against the (still vast majority) of the village now.
  • GaryTang 5y ago
    Conspiracy theorists said the virus came from Wuhan, then they said it had a low fatality rate, then they said COVID would be here to stay like the flu. Now the village is slowly accepting and even promoting all those “conspiracies”
  • criticaltinker 5y ago
    The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex. We must encourage discussions that move beyond overly-simplistic dualistic framing such as "vax versus anti-vax", "individual choice versus public health", etc. Looking back through human history we can find numerous examples where scientific consensus was wrong, or where we created powerful new tools that backfired in unexpected ways. Diversity in opinion and choice is natures way of arriving at optimal decisions. Although it feels like friction and divisive arguments to us now, these are critical discussions that help expand everyone's knowledge and awareness. At one level it appears to be chaos, but at a higher level it appears as harmony. We are now living in the age of the super-organism. The age where we all must become acutely aware that the separation between you and I - the separation between self and other - must be dissolved and reformulated, for the survival of our species and our planet.
    • naasking 5y ago
      > The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex. This seems disingenuous. We eradicated smallpox and scientific literacy just as low then. Why is it different this time? Because public trust in institutions has been destroyed. It's also a main reason why Trump was elected. The people in charge of these institutions destroyed this trust over decades, and they have continued to do so throughout the pandemic.
• baxtr 5y ago
  I like your comment, but not this part: > 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. I don't think that's possible, since I am not aware of a precedent. Meaning: the other 4 endemic coronaviruses which also started as pandemic and now are harmless cold viruses never caused a new deathly pandemic in a mutated form.
  • criticaltinker 5y ago
    Documents from scientists in the UK government articulate in great detail that it is a "realistic" possibility that the virus mutates to be deadlier and/or more transmissive [1]. One key difference between this coronavirus and the other endemic 4 is that mass vaccination strategies were never used. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance is a realistic consequence if vaccines are used indiscriminately [2][3][4][5]. So that is one way we may be setting a new precedent here. If you take a look at what happened with Marek's disease virus in chickens, it's not pretty - none of us wants a world where it is literally impossible to survive without vaccination, because multiple generations of vaccines were undermined by viral evolution. [1] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evolution-of-sars-cov-2-26-july-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... [2] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/ [3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016.2562 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016... [4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/ [5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1002198 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...
    • boc 5y ago
      Then why did the "worst" variant so far come from a place (India) with extremely low vaccination rates at the time? It's a numbers game. With chickens there are billions of chickens created and destroyed annually, and almost all of them are vaccinated in utero, so it makes sense that we'd see the disease get selectively deadlier. With Covid if you knock down the disease rate to something that's basically a few cases per month via vaccinations, you won't have enough chances for mutations to occur.
• l30n4da5 5y ago
  > Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. This is just history repeating itself, unfortunately. The Spanish flu had people protesting the counter-measures put in place to reduce transmission, as well.
  • Dwelve 5y ago
    How is this "history repeating itself"? A few people objected during the Spanish flu so if we have even a single person that objects nowadays it's "history repeating itself"? What if we discriminate against a minority based on their belief (e.g. refusing a medical intervention) and don't allow them to live a normal life. Is that also history repeating itself? I can think of a few instances in history where groups were prosecuted for their convictions. Are we currently repeating that part of history?
  • craftinator 5y ago
    It just boggles my mind that with modern understanding of how these things work (and we have a MUCH more complete understanding than they had during the early 1900's), we repeat this ignorant mistake.
    • Clubber 5y ago
      "Masks aren't effective" "Masks are effective" "Vaccinated don't have to wear masks" "Vaccinated should wear masks" "COVID is not airborne" "COVID is airborne" "COVID came from a wet market" "COVID came from a lab" "If you caught it, you have immunity" "If you caught it, you might not have immunity" It's not difficult to understand why there is so much confusion. Our government was and has been quite inept at its messaging in both Trump's and Biden's administrations. The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent. It's called the novel corona virus because it's new. What we think today may not be true next month or next year. I think one of the big problems of course is the government / bureaucrats / politicians are afraid to be straight with us. They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news. I feel their elusiveness is much, much worse; now trust is pretty low which makes the already ineffective government / bureaucrats / politicians' messaging even more ineffective. The government / bureaucrats / politicians found a hole and made it much bigger.
• tboyd47 5y ago
  Any time you use the government to force people to do something against their will, you have made the issue political. Politics is the business of force.
  • amznthrwaway 5y ago
    It’s political because Republicans decided they care more about Trump’s feelings than creating a coherent and effective response. This is ONLY political because there’s no longer such a thing as an intelligent or thoughtful Republican. Every single last one of you is either insane, or a sociopathic liar. You’re a sociopathic liar, so this is the website for you.
• paulddraper 5y ago
  > Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms. There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients. > Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. Probably, but even the question of whether vaccines should be a policy issue is in itself a policy issue.
  • edejong 5y ago
    > True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms. Citation needed. The delta variant is the prime counter-example with higher R0 and slightly higher mortality. SAGE admitted SARS-CoV-2 will very likely mutate to defeat all build-up immunity. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS and MERS) showed the potential to have very high infection fatality ratios. There is no reason at all to suspect COVID will suddenly become mild.
    • paulddraper 5y ago
      > higher R0 Contagiousness can certainly increase. Virulency does not usually increase. Severe flu seasons are characterized by increased infections, not so much increased fatality rate. > Citation needed. "Most viruses become less deadly as they mutate." https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/02/27/is-sars-cov-2-evolving-to-become-more-lethal https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/02/27/... (The article is about how COVID might buck the general trend. But in any case, that is the trend.)
      • edejong 5y ago
        Ok, instead of some handwaving from economist, I'd rather have Nature [1] with loads of good references and no paywall. My point is that we simply do not know. The word 'usual' is deceptive here. Usual for the viruses we studied? Usual for all viruses? Usual for viruses which recently have made the jump to a new species? We do not know. We simply have no idea. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-018-0055-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-018-0055-5
• collaborative 5y ago
  The one thing that still bothers me is that we don't yet know how quickly this coronavirus evolves, and from what we know it very likely escaped from a gain-of-function laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses. I didn't see Delta coming. I want to believe that this is the worst of it. But this coronavirus has so far kept us on our toes so it may well have a few more surprises in store
  • nintendo1889 5y ago
    Keep going down the rabbit hole, you'll eventually find that the variants are being caused by the vaccines.
  • peteretep 5y ago
    > it very likely escaped Do you have a source for “very likely”? I’m at “plausibly escaped from” so far and would be interested in evidence that changes that in either direction.
    • throwawaymsft 5y ago
      Why isn’t the burden of proof on the lone BSL4 lab in the country doing research on that very class of virus to prove its innocence?
    • collaborative 5y ago
      There has been some evidence of how the handlers of that laboratory's research went out of their way to shame anyone who'd suggest it emerged from there in the beginning, followed by mainstream articles noting that we simply can't rule this option out, and that the likeliest scenario is that some workers got accidentally infected and became patient 0 My "very likely", however, doesn't come from there. It's more of a statistical statement. What is the likelihood that a quickly mutating virus will appear next to a laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses and not have originated from there? The world is big. The chances of that happening are very low. Therefore it's very likely that it comes from the lab
    • evdubs 5y ago
• mrkramer 5y ago
  >Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. Why didn't China impose strict lockdown in the early days of epidemic in Wuhan area instead they let millions of Chinese people travel around the world and spread COVID? But then we wouldn't know "the true power of mRNA therapies and medications". Honestly death rate of 0.1% is not something to go crazy about. The thing to worry about is the intensity of the attack on COVID which is akin to abuse of antibiotics which led to occurrence of "superbacteria" which no antibiotic at the time can kill. The same can happen with viruses.
  • salamandersauce 5y ago
    It's not a 0.1% death rate. Over 1.6% of US confirmed covid cases have resulted in death for example. To get a 0.1% death rate you either have to assume there is 10 times more unreported cases (in which case everybody in the US has had covid once or multiple times already at this point) or claim stupid shit like people with comorbidites were going to die then anyways. Please don't spread misinformation.
    • mrkramer 5y ago
      You are spreading misinformation because you are not telling what age group is the most endangered and with what comorbidites. For example mortality rate in Mexico is 7.8% and in Peru 9.2% but in Denmark it is 0.8% and in Netherlands 0.9%.[0] You are not taking age of the group, health status and medical history of the group and quality of the health care and quality of the treatment they received in consideration. Read this article about what happened in Canadian Long Term Care homes: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-military-report-documents-deplorable-conditions-at-two/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili... And I referred to the death rate in the beginning of the pandemic and to be true you can not know real death cause of a person without autopsy. [0] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  > and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility. Is this not the case with other existing virus' like the flu? Yet people choose to go on with daily activities, even bringing it to the office just to feel (self?) important ...
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Possibly, though how often has a routine flu strain become a pandemic that overwhelms hospitals?
    • maerF0x0 5y ago
      agreed in the early days, and i'm not scientician, but my understand was that once you've had it you become increasingly immune (or unlikely to require hospitalization). I was more thinking about the future, than the immediate response. Seems like someday Corona virus will be something we just get like a cold or chicken pox?
      • nate_meurer 5y ago
        And also just like the other four common coronavirus types that we already live with.
      • paulryanrogers 5y ago
        There is a chicken pox vaccine. It reduces risk of shingles later in life compared with natural infection. My parents intentionally infected me early. I still got the pox a second time as an adolescent. Both times were painful. Please get your kids vaccinated.
• fruityrudy 5y ago
  But how long would you have us wear masks for?
• resource0x 5y ago
  > Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. You ain't seen nothing yet. How about firing nurses, firefighters, police, etc.?
• jshen 5y ago
  “ 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.” There is no reason to believe this. Many top experts, like Yaneer Bar-Yam, believe there is a real chance it continues to mutate to be worse.
• pbreit 5y ago
  This informed post is optimistic about covid after it's endemic: https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-here-to-stay-and-why-you-shouldnt-worry-about-it/ https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-her...
  • cylinder 5y ago
    are you kidding? this is basically a blog for a group of politial scientists
• natural219 5y ago
  This all sounds well and dandy, except the best data we have for covid-19 shows a .2% - .3% infection fatality rate, about 2x or 3x worse than the seasonal flu, which is still -- as we learned in May 2020 -- highly gated to people with severe age- and weight- related comorbidities. In short, comparing this to chicken pox or other epidemics with "massive body counts" is flatly asinine. It's a slightly worse version of the regular flu; always has been, seemingly always will be. Fwiw, I've been saying the same thing for 1.5 years now, which is what the original data reflects, which hasn't changed since then. Whenever we get new data that changes our understanding, we should reevaluate at that point.
  • rattray 5y ago
    5% more deadly would be "slightly". 2-3x more deadly and much more infectious isn't "slightly". You could perhaps say "like a deadlier flu".
• Scoundreller 5y ago
  > Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. I'm really hoping we can reduce the intermixing by some degree by banning lineups at airports security screen and customs/immigration lines, but I'm not holding my breath.
  • sleavey 5y ago
    Except 15 minutes before/after those lineups everyone was/is crammed together in the legally allowed minimum space on board the plane?
    • Scoundreller 5y ago
      The people on the same plane are going to/coming from the same place and at least direction. Not so in the completely mixed lineups.
• listless 5y ago
  “Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.” It’s truly maddening. My wife (very on the right) refused to get it and instead talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, vitamin D. All of which she got from conservative media. Right now she is lying in bed wracked with COVID. Ate up with fever and a cough that sends jolts of panic through me when i hear it echoing down the stairs. It breaks my heart, man. God help us and God bless all of you out there with sick loved ones. Sorry for the sappy post. It’s been a rough few days.
  • ntSean 5y ago
    Don't be sorry. I wish you all the best and for her recovery.
  • irrational 5y ago
    Has actually getting Covid changed her mind at all?
    • listless 5y ago
      She has changed her mind. But she will not get the vaccine after this because she will have natural immunity (her view).
      • ev0lv 5y ago
        Is your view different? You don't believe natural immunity?
        • Hedepig 5y ago
          I could be wrong, but I remember reading that a vaccine is more effective than natural immunity
          • radnor 5y ago
            You are correct. A recent study found that un-vaccinated individuals are 2.34 times as likely to be re-infected than vaccinated individuals. Get vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
• gonational 5y ago
  > Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. Sadly, there is one thing worse: health "authorities" and "experts" completely disregarding therapeutics, e.g., Ivermectin, which is as safe and as cheap as Aspirin, and which reduces the risk of serious illness and death by up to 86% [1] (which brings the death risk to about 1/4 of the flu... aka a low enough level to not even warrant a news story), all because a politician said it works. I recommend listening to episode #1671 of the Joe Rogan podcast, in which he interviews Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein. Once you listen to this, if you are not absolutely astounded by what you learn, please let me know (unless the reason is because you already knew this stuff). Edit: imagine being so ignorant and deranged as to down vote these well studied and cited (see below) facts. 1. https://c19ivermectin.com https://c19ivermectin.com