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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Doubtful. There’s not going to be a clear end time to this shut down, and I for one won’t be going to a bar until I’m vaccinated.

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You’re getting downvoted but I fully agree. Most people are talking as if the virus will be gone in a month or so. The lockdowns are not going away. We are going to have new hotspots popping up every week once lockdowns start releasing.

The downvotes in this sub-thread really confuse me. Do people honestly believe this virus is going away?

Even if it does, and I don’t know if it’ll ever go away, there’s not going to be a single date when it’s cool for us to go back to normal. Even a vaccine will take weeks or months to manufacture and distribute to the entire planet, if we even had one.

There won’t be a clear end date, even in retrospect.

There may never be a vaccine. If one can be developed, it may take years and it may not be completely safe and recommended for everyone.

I’ve resigned myself to the general understanding that any vaccine, if it’s possible, will most likely be out next year or later.

There are 115 vaccines in development now, in four very broad categories. This is a well-understood process and will very, very likely lead to several viable vaccines.

Further, inoculation can occur much sooner. That is, introducing antibodies obtained from recovered folk, into vulnerable folk. This is nearing deployment right now.

Don't be a wet blanket. Its not all bleak.

We don’t even know yet that people who have been previously infected have gained immunity. It’s fine to be optimistic, but there are no guarantees here.

That seems like more wet blanket. How often does recovery not give immunity? Lets keep it real.

Recent studies point to 25-30% of people didn’t have detectable levels of antibodies, or had too few for comfort.

Other coronaviruses, which are seasonal, have a reinfection rate of 30%.

More studies are needed, obviously, but dismissing real risks as “wet blankets” is extremely foolish.

That seems very strange. How did they 'recover' if they have no antibodies? Did the virus give up on its own?

A reinfection rate of 30% seems bad. How does that translate to an R0 I wonder.

It’s not at all odd, Antibodies aren’t forever. Chances are you’ve been reinfected with something you built up antibodies for dozens of times in your life.

For reasons currently unknown to science, exposure to some diseases confers lifelong immunity (chickenpox) but does not for other diseases (Flu, coronavirus, various types of common cold).

We’re actually starting to see the first reinfections of COVID-19 patients.

In addition to the sibling comment, there’s also the unlikely dengue scenario where getting infected once actually makes the next time worse.

Let’s hope we solve this virus (for whatever definition applies; we’re not particularly good at solving viruses) and apply some of that same effort to dengue before the world gets much warmer and it spreads.

I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, I'm just refraining from pretending I can predict the future. That seems like a useful skill now more than ever. The virus could mutate and become less potent. Populations could gain herd immunity relatively quickly. We could have a vaccine in a record-breaking time, defying all projections. Or none of that could happen, and we are forced to adapt our healthcare systems to handle COVID-19 the same way we handle so many other illnesses, and accept the associated fatalities.

There's plenty of possible outcomes and I see no reason to assume any given one is more likely than any other at this point.

Sure you do. Some of those scenarios are vastly more likely than others. Kind of the definition of a 'wet blanket', to keep bringing up unlikely negative outcomes like they might really happen.

Yes, yes, they might happen. But the likely scenario is, with 1M people working on a dozen fronts, that modern intelligent educated humans will defeat this. Not on just one front, but on several simultaneously. In a couple of months we'll be planning exactly how we'll proceed.

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