LurkerJ said:
Indeed, this isn't going anywhere. With it being more contagious than the seasonal flu, it will become a background pandemic, no doubt.
With that said, decades from now, when the children of today, who got and will get exposed repeatedly to COVID19 throughout their adulthood, will naturally have a better immune response to the inevitable seasonal COVID19 as they become adults and elderly and won't develop severe COVID19 illness, and as a result, you'll rarely see people hospitalized with COVID19. If that's actually the case, the best we can do for our generation is to vaccinate those who are at risk of severe COVID19 illness and open things up for the children of today and let nature take its course.
I wonder if I haven't had the common cold 50 times as a child what would've happened to me if I was only exposed to it when I am 40 or 50 (as I am sure you know the common cold 2nd most common cause is the coronavirus). I do question if we're doing kids a disservice by keeping them at home and "protecting" them from all the different microbes out there, I doubt few months would cause problems but this can't be the new normal.
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I'm one hundred percent sure that would be the case. Take polio, for instance. On the surface, a common enterovirus. It didn't trouble children and young adults until sanitation began to improve in the 19th century and viral exposure diminished. Then it became a true epidemic as opposed to a weird disease some older people would get.
I've seen some people wanting a future where masks and social distancing are common so they don't get sick, but that could end up easily breeding a dozen Covids out of current harmless or rare viruses.
useruserB said:
Is a lab origin really that far-fatched? Isn't it the purpose of gain of function research to mimic/re-create how zoonotic spillover events happen but in a more safe, secure and controlled lab environment?? And in a lab setting, you can remove some of the roadblocks and RNG that nature puts up like, frequency/duration of animal to animal/animal to human proximity/contact, co-infection of cells with a specific second virus for recombination potential, that pesky immune system that clears the infection before it can better adapt or spread to another host/species etc...
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Everything you just said would have happened far more easily in the wild. Coronaviruses are fairly common in many animals and managed to make the jump to humans and cause pandemics before. Like I mentioned before, people have contact with bats, etc. in Southeastern Asia by the hundreds of thousands. It would just take one chance mutation.
JRPGfan said:
How good are those versions? China's and India's?
Out of those 3, ironically I think I'd trust the russian version the most.
(I've seen a video with Dr John Campbell going over the study data from Sputnik V)
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As far as I know, China has one single-dose adenovirus vector vaccine and the rest of China's and India's so far are inactivated vaccines.
It looks like inactivated vaccines land between single-dose (which won't even divulge their efficacy against mild cases) and two-dose vector vaccines, with the added benefit of using the entire virus and, in theory, being less affected by variants with spike mutations.
Easier to adapt too; back then, it took just a few months for inactivated vaccines to be modified for the Asian and Hong Kong flu pandemics.
Last edited by haxxiy - on 16 February 2021
