4 ms·

Vaccinating everyone is a near impossible task but as with most things, you can get almost all the benefits by getting an 80-90% vaccination rate and letting he

• ncmncm 5y ago
  That might work if you could get all the animals vaccinated, too. But they are not being vaccinated at all, and won't be. They will continue innovating new strains on their own initiative. Herd immunity works only for microbes that have species preference. So, herd immunity turns out to be a fond delusion. We can only hope that the mice don't innovate a 40% fatal (in humans) strain as contagious as omicron. We certainly can't prevent it.
  • xmprt 5y ago
    The nice thing about viruses (although maybe not that nice considering we're talking about death) is that as fatality goes up, infectivity generally goes down. Also the virus will also quickly burn through the infected population and so it won't have as many opportunities for asymptomatic spread like with the Coronavirus.
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      It is hard to generalize reliably about viruses because each one relies on a different bag of tricks to be able to work at all. It is just lucky that the fatal ones often also work fast. But measles and smallpox, for two examples, did not self-limit at all effectively, depopulating whole regions. And the ones fatal to us but not to animal carriers completely sidestep the trend, even such as it is. A future strain of SARS hosted in animals can probably be counted on to sidestep that trend.