7 ms·

I have a strong feeling that Covid-19 is going to be with us for a long time. The problem with that is with a lot of the vulnerable population. This isn't "th

I have a strong feeling that Covid-19 is going to be with us for a long time. The problem with that is with a lot of the vulnerable population. This isn't "the flu".

yyyk 5y ago
Covid is known to be transferrable to animals and back. There's no way to kill it without measures that make the lockdowns look pretty or futuristic tech we don't have (no 'vaccinate everything' won't work, unless someone feels vaccinating every cave bat in safe third-world countries like Afghanistan in a reasonable timeframe is actually possible).
- throwaway55421 5y ago
  Also we'd need to vaccinate those bats with something which actually kills off corona rather than just reducing its' effects a bit.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
It is worse than the flu, but it isn't that much worse. With vaccines now widely available, people will just have to learn to stop being afraid. Get your annual covid vaccine, bundled with your flu vaccine, and go live your life.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Vaccines aside, many of us never saw others dying lung-less "after a flu". Vaccines included, some of us were never told that "a flu" could frequently provide long term impairment (this with reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339783 )
  - helge9210 5y ago
    TL;DR If it got to lungs, they (COVID-19, flu) are both worse. Any lung infection will have a lasting effect (in survivors). In lucky cases, pneumonia is caused by bacteria sensitive to antibiotics. If it's viral (flu, SARS/MERS/SARS-Cov-2 or anything else) or antibiotic resistant hospital bactery, that's basically it.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    Yes, "many of us" never knew about the risk of Influenza. That doesn't mean it wasn't there. COVID is significantly less dangerous to the younger age groups than Influenza[1]. We've known this for a while now, but you rarely see a table comparing the two, because the dogma that "COVID is not like the Flu!" must not be questioned. At the same time, COVID is also significantly more dangerous than Influenza for the older age groups. The two diseases are very different, but we still need to compare them to get an understanding of the actual dangers. We've always lived with the danger of communicable diseases. It's never going away. If we constantly bombard people with the risks of this particular disease, it will cause a lot of stress and anxiety, which is significantly associated with all-cause mortality. [1] https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-vs-influenza-by-age-d33a1c76c198?gi=ad1613953b29 https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...
  - MontyCarloHall 5y ago
    > Vaccines included, some of us were never told that "a flu" could frequently provide long term impairment The article you link does not claim that long term impairment is frequent. From the article: > A UK study estimates that between 7% and 18% of people who had COVID-19 went on to develop some symptoms of long COVID that lingered for at least 5 weeks. However, this study does not consider severity of symptoms. Someone with a persistent cough for 5 weeks after infection is considered to have “long COVID,” just as someone with massive loss of pulmonary function is considered to have “long COVID.” It also does not control for long COVID symptoms that are merely correlatory, e.g. insomnia. I had intermittent insomnia for the first few months of the pandemic, because I was afraid for the state of the world. Yet if I had contracted COVID in those months, I too could be considered a long COVID sufferer. I have yet to see a study that estimates the prevalence of severe long-term symptoms causally stemming from COVID infections. My guess is that it’s vanishingly small; given the sheer number of COVID infections, it would be obvious to everyone if a sizable portion of them actually went on to develop severe long-term symptoms. If 7-18% of COVID infections actually resulted in the severe long COVID symptoms described in the article (e.g. “extreme fatigue, breathlessness, [or] difficulty concentrating”), it would be extremely evident on a societal level.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      > vanishingly small You do not have relevant acquaintances to confirm that anecdotally - numbers aside, as a real risk? > it would be extremely evident on a societal level For the cognitive aspect, I am not sure it could become so evident, given the already suboptimal situation. (If you live in a place where "all are bright", please let me know what that encouraging utopia is: I will relocate within the month.) This is not sarcasm or even irony: I believe that cognitive issues are ignored in many societies, and/hence a further decline will hardly be visible. Again, a few in my circle have noted that, but they just go on working as before. This friend of mine had an accident years ago, and started losing his "laser-like precision": he mentioned his concern with the director, who replied «You are simply getting older». I believe that the consideration of relative cognitive falls is very normally relegated to either passing episodes or normal ageing as revealed in natural jerks.
  - softwaredoug 5y ago
    My understanding is severe viral illness of any kind can lead to long-term symptoms. It's not specific to Covid. However, because Covid has led to more severe illness, we see more 'long-covid' than other viruses https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033403-400-long-covid-we-have-ignored-post-viral-syndromes-for-too-long/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033403-400-long-cov...
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      Well, then as a society (of societies) we should put that "post illness risk of long-term symptoms" as a priority as a topic of focus... Something that, with the relevant details (not just the idea of course), should already be taught in primary school, after the first notions of food theory, hygiene, anatomy, physical education etc.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    On the contrary, many of us have lost loved ones to the flu. The flu is not a joke. That said, it is something we tolerate and manage as a society.
u320 5y ago
There is no reasonable scenario under which it goes away at all.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  You make a technically correct, but not very useful statement. The overall evolutionary path for the virus is most likely to be in the direction of higher infectivity and lower deadliness. Viruses don't tend to replicate in dead hosts, so, a virus that doesn't kill people is fitter evolutionarily than one which does. This means that, while the virus is certainly not going away, the risk eventually will. This may take a long time, though. It may take decades. Here is an article from New Scientist that says essentially the same thing, but in more detail: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7825868/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7825868/
  - junga 5y ago
    I just had this thought yesterday: Could the process you described be sped up? If there was a virus variant that spreads faster but is less deadly it would replace the known variants but do less harm. So let's head to the bat cave and build the virus variant we could handle. (what could possibly go wrong?) At least in theory this should be possible, right? Edit: Fixed typos
    - jauco 5y ago
      It’s not that the more benign virus beats the other one over the head, just that the more deadly strain dies out eventually while the more benign one doesn’t. Adding benign strains can’t speed up this process
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - tux3 5y ago
      o A large part of the mechanism by which ncov kills is the immune system's response. There's no "kill the host" gene that you can simply snip out. It does harm as a second order effect, not as a feature. o DNA is really complex to work with; designing proteins is harder when you don't have the luxury of being Nature itself and trying it out in vivo. o You will have a PR problem of hilarious proportions. Virus genetic engineering research labs are a few points short of popular support at the moment.
iamstupidsimple 5y ago
That's what vaccines are for, no?
helge9210 5y ago
Humans are mortal. Some sooner. I'm not willing to keep my children in a box their whole life to get my parent live couple of years longer. I'll probably resort to a lethal force if this will be imposed for the benefit of someone I'm not related with.
- nickpeterson 5y ago
  You sound like a wacko.
  - helge9210 5y ago
    That's the problem with mass psychosis. Everyone starts to behave like a dangerous lunatic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Ambolia 5y ago
Shouldn't we limit the vaccines for the risk populations in that case? Vaccinating everybody just promotes vaccine resistant variants.
- bonzini 5y ago
  Not entirely. By reducing the amount of time that the virus spends in your body, it has much less time it has to develop a radically different variant (it has to combine many mutations in order to escape vaccination). Alpha and Omicron at least are theorized to have developed in people that hosted the virus for months.
- fer 5y ago
  Actually letting the virus mutate without adequate immune response is what produces those variants, as you remove local minima from the evolutionary chain. The fact that most VOCs popped in areas with little to no vaccination coverage quite aligns with that. For omicron the main hypothesis is it actually evolved in a severely immunocompromised HIV patient. Edit: This isn't exactly new[0] and it's also been witnessed for SARS-CoV-2[1]: > These compilations of case reports indicate the need to identify whether certain forms of immunosuppression are associated with an increased risk of such multimutational escape patterns — for instance, specific cancers or specific therapies, such as the development of B-cell aplasia related to CAR T-cell or anti-CD20 therapy, prolonged use of glucocorticoids, long-term chemotherapy, or radiotherapy. Similarly, organ transplant recipients and those with untreated or poorly controlled human immunodeficiency virus infection may also have prolonged SARS-CoV-2 infection and could constitute a reservoir of divergent escape variants that can spread in the general community. Prolonged viral replication in the context of an inadequate immune response facilitates the emergence of immune-pressure escape mutations.[0] I'd appreciate an actual counter argument, other than a poorly understood Marek disease analogy. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249157/ [1]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
chromatin 5y ago
It is never, ever going away. In fact, the 4 other endemic coronaviruses in the human population with zoonotic origin can be traced via mutational drift to their leap to humans; the most recent I believe came from cattle in the 1800s. These other coronaviruses are mostly a problem only for immunocompromised individuals such as transplant recipients. The real issue IMO is whether SARS-CoV-2 was artificially engineered (ok, even if it weren’t it is more like SARS and MERS) and whether it will remain potently virulent even for healthy individuals who are exposed as children (as we all were to the endemic coronaviruses).

I have a strong feeling that Covid-19 is going to be with us for a long time. The problem with that is with a lot of the vulnerable population. This isn't "the flu".

yyyk 5y ago

Covid is known to be transferrable to animals and back. There's no way to kill it without measures that make the lockdowns look pretty or futuristic tech we don't have (no 'vaccinate everything' won't work, unless someone feels vaccinating every cave bat in safe third-world countries like Afghanistan in a reasonable timeframe is actually possible).

throwaway55421 5y ago
Also we'd need to vaccinate those bats with something which actually kills off corona rather than just reducing its' effects a bit.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

It is worse than the flu, but it isn't that much worse. With vaccines now widely available, people will just have to learn to stop being afraid. Get your annual covid vaccine, bundled with your flu vaccine, and go live your life.

mdp2021 5y ago
Vaccines aside, many of us never saw others dying lung-less "after a flu". Vaccines included, some of us were never told that "a flu" could frequently provide long term impairment (this with reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339783 )
- helge9210 5y ago
  TL;DR If it got to lungs, they (COVID-19, flu) are both worse. Any lung infection will have a lasting effect (in survivors). In lucky cases, pneumonia is caused by bacteria sensitive to antibiotics. If it's viral (flu, SARS/MERS/SARS-Cov-2 or anything else) or antibiotic resistant hospital bactery, that's basically it.
- incrudible 5y ago
  Yes, "many of us" never knew about the risk of Influenza. That doesn't mean it wasn't there. COVID is significantly less dangerous to the younger age groups than Influenza[1]. We've known this for a while now, but you rarely see a table comparing the two, because the dogma that "COVID is not like the Flu!" must not be questioned. At the same time, COVID is also significantly more dangerous than Influenza for the older age groups. The two diseases are very different, but we still need to compare them to get an understanding of the actual dangers. We've always lived with the danger of communicable diseases. It's never going away. If we constantly bombard people with the risks of this particular disease, it will cause a lot of stress and anxiety, which is significantly associated with all-cause mortality. [1] https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-vs-influenza-by-age-d33a1c76c198?gi=ad1613953b29 https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  > Vaccines included, some of us were never told that "a flu" could frequently provide long term impairment The article you link does not claim that long term impairment is frequent. From the article: > A UK study estimates that between 7% and 18% of people who had COVID-19 went on to develop some symptoms of long COVID that lingered for at least 5 weeks. However, this study does not consider severity of symptoms. Someone with a persistent cough for 5 weeks after infection is considered to have “long COVID,” just as someone with massive loss of pulmonary function is considered to have “long COVID.” It also does not control for long COVID symptoms that are merely correlatory, e.g. insomnia. I had intermittent insomnia for the first few months of the pandemic, because I was afraid for the state of the world. Yet if I had contracted COVID in those months, I too could be considered a long COVID sufferer. I have yet to see a study that estimates the prevalence of severe long-term symptoms causally stemming from COVID infections. My guess is that it’s vanishingly small; given the sheer number of COVID infections, it would be obvious to everyone if a sizable portion of them actually went on to develop severe long-term symptoms. If 7-18% of COVID infections actually resulted in the severe long COVID symptoms described in the article (e.g. “extreme fatigue, breathlessness, [or] difficulty concentrating”), it would be extremely evident on a societal level.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    > vanishingly small You do not have relevant acquaintances to confirm that anecdotally - numbers aside, as a real risk? > it would be extremely evident on a societal level For the cognitive aspect, I am not sure it could become so evident, given the already suboptimal situation. (If you live in a place where "all are bright", please let me know what that encouraging utopia is: I will relocate within the month.) This is not sarcasm or even irony: I believe that cognitive issues are ignored in many societies, and/hence a further decline will hardly be visible. Again, a few in my circle have noted that, but they just go on working as before. This friend of mine had an accident years ago, and started losing his "laser-like precision": he mentioned his concern with the director, who replied «You are simply getting older». I believe that the consideration of relative cognitive falls is very normally relegated to either passing episodes or normal ageing as revealed in natural jerks.
- softwaredoug 5y ago
  My understanding is severe viral illness of any kind can lead to long-term symptoms. It's not specific to Covid. However, because Covid has led to more severe illness, we see more 'long-covid' than other viruses https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033403-400-long-covid-we-have-ignored-post-viral-syndromes-for-too-long/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033403-400-long-cov...
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Well, then as a society (of societies) we should put that "post illness risk of long-term symptoms" as a priority as a topic of focus... Something that, with the relevant details (not just the idea of course), should already be taught in primary school, after the first notions of food theory, hygiene, anatomy, physical education etc.
- 01100011 5y ago
  On the contrary, many of us have lost loved ones to the flu. The flu is not a joke. That said, it is something we tolerate and manage as a society.

u320 5y ago

There is no reasonable scenario under which it goes away at all.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
You make a technically correct, but not very useful statement. The overall evolutionary path for the virus is most likely to be in the direction of higher infectivity and lower deadliness. Viruses don't tend to replicate in dead hosts, so, a virus that doesn't kill people is fitter evolutionarily than one which does. This means that, while the virus is certainly not going away, the risk eventually will. This may take a long time, though. It may take decades. Here is an article from New Scientist that says essentially the same thing, but in more detail: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7825868/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7825868/
- junga 5y ago
  I just had this thought yesterday: Could the process you described be sped up? If there was a virus variant that spreads faster but is less deadly it would replace the known variants but do less harm. So let's head to the bat cave and build the virus variant we could handle. (what could possibly go wrong?) At least in theory this should be possible, right? Edit: Fixed typos
  - jauco 5y ago
    It’s not that the more benign virus beats the other one over the head, just that the more deadly strain dies out eventually while the more benign one doesn’t. Adding benign strains can’t speed up this process
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tux3 5y ago
    o A large part of the mechanism by which ncov kills is the immune system's response. There's no "kill the host" gene that you can simply snip out. It does harm as a second order effect, not as a feature. o DNA is really complex to work with; designing proteins is harder when you don't have the luxury of being Nature itself and trying it out in vivo. o You will have a PR problem of hilarious proportions. Virus genetic engineering research labs are a few points short of popular support at the moment.

iamstupidsimple 5y ago

That's what vaccines are for, no?

helge9210 5y ago

Humans are mortal. Some sooner. I'm not willing to keep my children in a box their whole life to get my parent live couple of years longer. I'll probably resort to a lethal force if this will be imposed for the benefit of someone I'm not related with.

nickpeterson 5y ago
You sound like a wacko.
- helge9210 5y ago
  That's the problem with mass psychosis. Everyone starts to behave like a dangerous lunatic.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Ambolia 5y ago

Shouldn't we limit the vaccines for the risk populations in that case? Vaccinating everybody just promotes vaccine resistant variants.

bonzini 5y ago
Not entirely. By reducing the amount of time that the virus spends in your body, it has much less time it has to develop a radically different variant (it has to combine many mutations in order to escape vaccination). Alpha and Omicron at least are theorized to have developed in people that hosted the virus for months.
fer 5y ago
Actually letting the virus mutate without adequate immune response is what produces those variants, as you remove local minima from the evolutionary chain. The fact that most VOCs popped in areas with little to no vaccination coverage quite aligns with that. For omicron the main hypothesis is it actually evolved in a severely immunocompromised HIV patient. Edit: This isn't exactly new[0] and it's also been witnessed for SARS-CoV-2[1]: > These compilations of case reports indicate the need to identify whether certain forms of immunosuppression are associated with an increased risk of such multimutational escape patterns — for instance, specific cancers or specific therapies, such as the development of B-cell aplasia related to CAR T-cell or anti-CD20 therapy, prolonged use of glucocorticoids, long-term chemotherapy, or radiotherapy. Similarly, organ transplant recipients and those with untreated or poorly controlled human immunodeficiency virus infection may also have prolonged SARS-CoV-2 infection and could constitute a reservoir of divergent escape variants that can spread in the general community. Prolonged viral replication in the context of an inadequate immune response facilitates the emergence of immune-pressure escape mutations.[0] I'd appreciate an actual counter argument, other than a poorly understood Marek disease analogy. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249157/ [1]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

chromatin 5y ago

It is never, ever going away. In fact, the 4 other endemic coronaviruses in the human population with zoonotic origin can be traced via mutational drift to their leap to humans; the most recent I believe came from cattle in the 1800s. These other coronaviruses are mostly a problem only for immunocompromised individuals such as transplant recipients. The real issue IMO is whether SARS-CoV-2 was artificially engineered (ok, even if it weren’t it is more like SARS and MERS) and whether it will remain potently virulent even for healthy individuals who are exposed as children (as we all were to the endemic coronaviruses).