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- Thread starter BigWoof31
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And this here is where you get people saying this is all a conspiracy to permanently control people's behavior.
Right now, I wear a mask in places I have to (work, stores, etc.), but I'll be God-fucking-damned if I'm going to be wearing a mask "for many years to come" just because the focus now is not on "flattening the curve" but rather absolute prevention of spread.
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I’m hoping a vaccine will allow us to be able to not need masks. It looks like people will need more than 1 dose of these vaccines to achieve adequate protection.
But the percentage of people who will be unwilling to receive a vaccine looks like it’s going to be fairly high, and that could prevent the country from achieving herd immunity.
So then, will there be mask requirements next year? If somebody has received the full doses of the vaccine, will that person be exempt from such requirements?
it looks like another mess waiting to happen.
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I'm a little more optimistic. The most common belief expressed among doctors that I've seen comment is that herd (community) immunity occurs at roughly 70% immunity. It does not matter how the immunity is acquired. I've seen no polls that say as many as 30% of people have already decided against the vaccine, but even if it's a little over 30%, the immunity acquired by people who've had it will push the overall number over the herd immunity threshold. The question is, how safe and effective will the vaccine be?
Some doctors on vumedi.com have expressed a concern that there is already a concerning level of distrust of vaccines in the population at large. If the coronavirus vaccine is given to 200 million people and kills just 0.001% of them, then it has still killed 2000 people. If it kills 1 in 10,000, then it will have killed 20,000 people. That's a lot fewer than the disease has killed, but when you lay that many bodies at the feet of a vaccine, you could end up with huge numbers of people turning away from all vaccines.
With my Systems Engineering hat on I have to call this the worst-case-scenario of competing requirements. They have to develop it fast, but the consequences of a mistake are incredibly dire. We Systems Engineers like to say "you can have it fast, cheap, good: choose 2". This is a situation where we don't care about the cost, but both "fast" and "good" are extremely important.
While we're on the subject, feel free to talk about how the vaccine is going to be paid in the poli thread. It is a given that it is going to be very expensive to develop, especially to develop and test it as fast as is necessary. How that will be paid for is a political discussion. Have fun with that.
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I'm assuming you're replying to the "And this here is where you get people saying this is all a conspiracy to permanently control people's behavior" portion of my post. Ever hear of the term "mission creep"?
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As much as I hope I'm wrong, there's not going to be a vaccine for this. They haven't been able to develop one for SARS or MERS...hell, we haven't been able to figure out the common cold.
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I can't say you're wrong Mili
My own expectation is based on the beliefs of the doctors who post on vumedi.com who are working on the vaccine. Although they'll be the first to tell you that developing a vaccine (or vaccine series) for a coronavirus is extremely difficult, they uniformly expect it to be developed by early next year; some even go so far as to say maybe by December. Their chief concern is not that they won't succeed, it is that there will be enormous pressure to distribute the vaccine before it's been properly tested. This happens to technical people all of the time; it's happened to me. You develop something. You tell the suits it's not ready yet. They ship it anyway. They crucify you because it wasn't ready.
The fact that they expect to succeed where they did not in the other situations is, I expect, because the needs are different. With other epidemics, they spread fast and killed a lot of the people they infected, a good recipe for a pathogen to "burn itself out". By the time you make progress on the vaccine, the sheer nastiness of the pathogen has been its own worst enemy and has done the job for you.
The common cold is a little more complicated. A lot of people think they know that the cold is caused by the Rhinovirus. That's partially true. The common cold, like a lot of diseases, is merely a suite of symptoms that has multiple causes. One of those causes is the Human Rhinovirus (HRV), but there are several others, one of which is known as the seasonal coronavirus. The seasonal coronavirus is actually responsible for about 20% of colds, so it is likely that every single person reading these words has had a coronavirus infection, most of us multiple times. So why no vaccine? Because developing a vaccine for something that produces as complex and short-lived an immune response as the seasonal coronavirus is incredibly difficult, and the seasonal coronavirus is a nuisance; it will not be in the CDCs top-50 priorities, ever. SARS-CoV-2 on the other hand, is the #1 priority of every person remotely related to the field of epidemiology. A vaccine for it is a very high priority and is heavily funded.
I don't believe it will happen because it's being pursued by a lot of smart people that have been given carte blanche though. I believe it will happen because those smart people say they expect to succeed in the next 4 to 9 months (with TBD months of testing to follow before it's available). I also freely admit that they, and by extension I, might be wrong.
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OK... Since I've gone there
Some research on coronaviruses, including the seasonal coronavirus, suggests that they might be able to create a vaccine that won't be able to keep you from getting infected, but will keep you from getting sick.
This is by far the most promising avenue of the research TO ME; it is all based on conjecture. "Well, this looks like that, and that responded this way to that other thing, and that other thing helped over there, and here and there aren't THAT different soooooo..." You get the idea.
This is all a plateful of "I don't know" with a side of "On the otherhand..."
Some research on coronaviruses, including the seasonal coronavirus, suggests that they might be able to create a vaccine that won't be able to keep you from getting infected, but will keep you from getting sick.
This is by far the most promising avenue of the research TO ME; it is all based on conjecture. "Well, this looks like that, and that responded this way to that other thing, and that other thing helped over there, and here and there aren't THAT different soooooo..." You get the idea.
This is all a plateful of "I don't know" with a side of "On the otherhand..."
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In fairness, there were solid leads on SARS, they just weren’t pursued because the virus “went away”. There is also a promising vaccine for MERS in clinical trials now, it’s just been overshadowed by COVID.
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Alright so... I couldn't find the original article from earlier this month but I think this is the study...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z
Abstract in part:
Then in the course of searching for that, I found this:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/health/t-cells-coronavirus-study-wellness/index.html
So, I dunno how much you guys have been posting it here, but a lot of the immunity discussion has been shifting to T cells so, in the top one is a Singapore study where they ID that there are T-Cells in the population resistant to COVID 19, including SARS outbreak survivors who have memory T Cells from 17 years ago....
THen the next one is a study in Germany that puts the prevalence of said T-Cells at up to 35% (small sample size).
A good long while back I posted something similar about antibodies prevalence in Asia offering at least limited immunity based on exposure to SARS and other coronaviruses.
Now, why quote that along with the vaccine.
So, I think once the vaccine rolls out, the R naught will drop pretty quickly well below 1, because I think there's a pretty wide set of factors other than just 70% of people taking it...
So, first is, what is the population prevalence going to be by the end of the year... (I'm being kind of hypothetical here so if you don't like the numbers I'm good with that, not my point, big guesstimating)
If there are 7 million cases by the end of the year, CDC is saying we might only be catching 1 in 10 cases due to early issue, assyms etc... that by itself would be close to 20%... I think its high and we will see what more robust seroprevalence tests return, but at some point this part become important, even at 15% (These guys here estimate the undercount at a wonderfully wide 6 to 24 times... so if you're super optimistic 24 times 4 million is a big number https://www.the-scientist.com/news-...dy-in-us-shows-vast-covid-19-undercount-67762) And this data is old right now but that NYC test put it at 23%, now of course nearly everywhere else is a long way from the NYC infections per X people, and I think we'd prefer not to get there but... maybe slowly places catch up.
Then you have these TCell immunity factors - Is 35% right? I dunno, but even if its 15% - there's another big chunk (and largely the point here is there shouldn't be much, if any overlap between those groups)
But for giggles, let's say with those 2 things you already have 30% of people with some meaningful protection...that's a big deal.
(obviously there's a whole lot of "we don't know which people already have protection" that's going on, so you don't get to say, just give some other 30% the vaccine, but what you will have is 30% of the people who may not run to the front of the line, probably don't actually need it, and you get to 60% a lot quicker that way)
Anyway, I'm having a mostly rotten day so, if I don't respond to comments on this, nothing personal, I probably shouldn't be posting at all.
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