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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

It is going to be a "pandemic" regardless of what we do short of sealing off all travel for a long time. It does not kill a vast majority of the people it infects unlike Ebola so there will always be a large pool of carriers and the time it remains in circulation will be much longer. So if anything this is being underhyped. It is going to spread everywhere eventually.

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There are already vaccine prototypes in the lab. The hope is we can delay the spread long enough that they can get out of the lab and into mass production. Next years flu shot could contain this as well if all goes perfect. If we can just hold back until then we are okay. That is a big if though.

Source on vaccine prototypes being in the lab? I recall seeing headlines a few weeks back that the genome had been sequenced, but hadn't heard anything regarding vaccine progress since then.

google finds plenty. I linked to one.

They are all early prototypes based on work that the lab was already doing. Nothing is anywhere close to human trails that I know of.

That is at least 12-18 months away

That is why I used works like "hope" and "big if". If everything goes perfect it can happen. It only needs one of the early attempts to turn out to work, do great in early testing and be easy to manufacture. Easy to manufacture depends on scale - if the virus turns out to be spreading fast it will be easier to manufacture because a lot of resources will be put into building the ability to make whatever turns out to work.

Safety becomes less important in the worst cases too. If you have a 1% chance of going blind from the vaccine, or a 20% chance of death, a vaccine that would normally fail tests looks good. (20% chance of death of course means the virus mutates to both spread faster and kill more people - generally unlikely)

Yeah, keep holding out hope for a viral vaccine

Do you have sources for this, or are you talking about the SARS vaccine in Houston that has not been tested on the COVID-19 and never got past animal testing for SARS? If the latter, I agree that it seems promising and is a better state than I thought we were in, but calling it a COVID-19 prototype is just not accurate.

Google finds plenty of sources. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-long-will-it-take...

Again, I'm not sure if anything will come out of it - to develop and test a useful vaccine in a useful amount of time requires everything to go perfect. I only claimed progress in the lab.

I don't see anything that can be credibly claimed as a "prototype", which implies far more than "progress in a lab"

If that's true, then that's worse than it's portrayed by the authorities. I've read that roughly 20% of those who get it need intensive care with artificial respiration, but there are not enough facilities to accommodate such patients if a larger wave of infections occurs.

No, only 20% of cases.

The key difference is that not all infections turn into cases. A lot of people seem to get a lesser version of the disease, and may not feel symptoms beyond those of a bad cold -- these people never get diagnosed, and so don't factor into the 20% case severity ratio.

It does seem like it is worse than the authorities say, but I can't imagine that that 20% number is based on much more than the number who goes to the hospital, which would be only a small percent.

Overall I am worried, but I expect society to survive, minus some issues (and of course some deaths).

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