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SvennoJ on 25 January 2021
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haxxiy said:

I'm slightly concerned with the medium-term effectiveness of those vaccines, since most of them target exclusively the spike protein. That's a very limited pool of antigen epitopes, some of which could likely be changed with a single base pair mutation.

The virus will be under tremendous evolutionary pressure and variants that evade neutralizing antibodies might have a chance to proliferate, though with less potency than the virus has against "virgin" immune systems.

Depending on how severe the disease still remains, especially for the vulnerable groups, booster shots might be needed. Either that or second-generation live attenuated vaccines become the gold standard for immunization.

Edit - that all is assuming cell-based immunity to the spike protein will be affected, and not counting antibody affinity maturation, which might work to prevent infection altogether no matter what. So, that might not even happen. Smallpox was flat out eradicated just by providing immunity to a different virus, after all.

It needs to be effective long enough to get the virus to die out by keeping the rate of transmission under 1.0

Atm we need (temporary) lock downs next to transmission rate reducing measures like masks and social distancing. At first the vaccines can remove the need for lock downs and closures, then maybe relax social distancing while keeping masks the longest. (Keeping masks and extra cleaning is not a bad idea for during flu season)

Although immunization for covid-19 will probably become a long term thing, required for travel to countries where it could still be around in rural areas for years to come. The world is so big, there will be plenty places with the right population density / age distribution for the virus to hang around Rt 1.0, not escalating prompting special measures, but not disappearing either.

Treatment will get better as well, hopefully this is the last really deadly period of Covid-19 and death rates should never get close to 100K per week again.



Meanwhile
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/225-million-jobs-were-lost-worldwide-in-2020-thanks-to-the-pandemic-report-finds-1.5281152

In a fresh study, the UN's International Labour Organization (ILO) found that a full 8.8 per cent of global working hours were lost in 2020, compared to the fourth quarter of 2019. That is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs, or "approximately four times greater than the number lost during the 2009 global financial crisis,"

On the other hand, if we go by a very optimistic potential global death rate of 0.3%, taking worldinfo meters and assuming 10x more people (undetected asymptomatic cases) have recovered, and say potentially 60% of the world population could have been infected by now if nothing was done, about 12 million lives have been saved so far.

So 1 life is worth 21 jobs.

Of course the 10x more cases than detected likely doesn't hold true anymore today, deaths are under counted or entirely missed as Covid deaths in less developed countries, many many more lives would have been lost if the hospital systems had all collapsed, plus the longer we 'draw it out' the more effective treatments become.

Doing nothing was not an option and would have potentially led to 200 million deaths by now and the total collapse of health care in most countries, resulting in chaos leading to many more jobs lost over all.

It's shit, but it would have been so much worse without the lock downs and closures. However it could also have been better if people had co-operated more with the measures instead of railing against masks, social distancing and not having enough fun. What should be measured is how many extra jobs (and lives) were lost by people continuing to travel and go out for non essential reasons.