Hacker News Reader

Comment by KCUOJJQJ | Hacker News Reader

>It might be more economically efficient (and convenient) for the strong and healthy to purposefully self-infect

If someone told me I should deliberately catch a cold I'd say no. What about Ebola? I'd say no! A germ that I don't know? I'd say no!

If a police patrol arrived somewhere and someone ran away, that person would be suspicious. If I'm asked to get any germ I'd suspect that it's very dangerous, even if it was just a cold.

So telling people to infect themselves deliberately won't work.

View on HN

I’d do it. Everyone is going to catch this. I think I already had it (doesn’t everyone?) but in the event I didn’t, if I could volunteer to get infected I would do it.

I’m assuming because you are sure having it once will give you some immunity? It’s really unclear if that is true and I respectfully disagree with those who same it is more likely than not.

Everyone is going to catch this. Either I wait around for it to happen or I volunteer. I’d rather volunteer.

Stop spreading misinformation, there were studies in South Korea that say you won't reinfect after you get it. That's why the strong and healthy can help by self-infecting.

Not exactly. Some hundreds of patients were thought to have gotten rid of the virus during hospital stay and treatment and sent home after confirming through RT-PCR tests. But they were found to be covid+ve afterwards. Studies indicated that the +ve tests were 'likely' from the genetic material that lingered from the first infection and not from re-infection. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-reinfections-were-fa... However, they do not declare that you cannot get re-infected two months down the line or two years down the line. We don't have that information about immunity yet.

Yes, but the great bulk of evidence pretty much that you won't reinfect once you get it.

That is utter nonsense, that evidence can't exist with out the time having passed to gather it.

"The great bulk of evidence' in this situation would mean the data on the duration of presence of Neutralizing antibodies in the blood stream of people who got rid of the virus. But this data is not there yet,as I said before.

Scientists are currently working to figure out how long the antibodies stay in the body and if they are potent enough to fight re-infections.

There is 'no great bulk of evidence' yet. Unless I'm wrong, and I hope I am.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... "For any country contemplating these issues, another crucial question is how solid is the assumption that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein equate to functional protection?Furthermore, if presence of these antibodies is protective, how can it be decided what proportion of the population requires these antibodies to mitigate subsequent waves of cases of COVID-19?"

"Furthermore, studies in COVID-19 show that 10–20% of symptomatically infected people have little or no detectable antibody."

We need more data, which I understand scientists all over the world are working relentlessly to deliver, to believe that 'you won't reinfect once you get it'

South Korea has studies that show re-infection after you get it won't happen in any meaningful way.

They'd made those conclusions in < 3 months? What is your source?

Most antibodies to viruses don't last forever, the question is not if you can get COVID19 twice (you almost surely can) but how long in-between are you protected.

And the evidence is unclear, and in some cases worrying:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja...

As @tpnCC and @seppin said, there is significant clinical & scientific uncertainty about covid19 antibody response and duration, partly because there hasn't been enough time to collect the relevant data (for covid19) and partly because of prior resarch indicating reduced human antibody response to SARS.

Lower in this thread I commented about a 2011 resarch paper that demonstrated anti-SARS antibody levels fell by half 2 years postinfection and were undetectable 6 years postinfection in 21 of 23 SARS patients tested.

see this chart https://www.jimmunol.org/content/186/12/7264.long#sec-7

If those SARS numbers are in the same vein as what is true for COVID19, the only answer is a vaccine. Otherwise our current state of affairs is the new normal for the foreseeable future.

I would also argue vaccine is not likely for many related reasons.

In that case COVID19 will play out like the 1918 flu, it will hit in waves that only mass quarantine will help mitigate, until enough immunity is reached. Likely 18 months - 2 years.

It's estimated that ~14% of common cold cases are caused by coronaviruses (HCoV-OC43, HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63)... so although it seems particularly difficult, if we do manage to discover how to develop effective vaccines against Covid19, perhaps the silver lining is that vaccines against the related viruses responsible for a significant fraction of the common cold will be in reach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_coronavirus_OC43

There is a big problem with optimistically assuming immune systems will respond like SARS even, because we know in general terms the more severe the symptoms the longer the immunity lasts, but wait ... huge huge numbers of people with Covid-19 are asymptotic, that is not the cases with it’s SARS and MERS relatives! wake up people, herd immunity is delusional and dangerous. more likely is very short immunity, just like the other 4 Corona family virus which cause many of our common colds, high asymptotic rates, and reinfect us very very frequently and NOT due to mutations!

http://www.columbia.edu/~jls106/galanti_shaman_ms_supp.pdf

Just to spell it out: herd immunity depends on sustained immunity postinfection. It seems possible, perhaps probable, that covid19 "immunity" may have an unusually short duration or attenuated response, resulting in an effective herd population that is a fraction of the theoretical herd population. I.e. if 60% of Americans have been infected and recovered after 12 months, but antibody levels drop 25% after 12 months, the true number of immune americans comprising the herd will be less than 60%.

If so, we may need to consider pursuing a relatively slow and steady relaxation of lockdown to tune the rate of new infections such that herd immunity is kept as stable as possible - i.e. flatten curve into truly flat-but-nonzero line

Talk about spreading mis-information! I really hope you were joking about self-infecting.

We don't "know" that infection confers any sort of lasting immunity, but there's zero reason to believe it doesn't give you immunity at least for a few years.

This is all rooted in the media narrative trying to scare people to stay at home "you could catch it over and over again". It's not science, and it's counter productive.

Well, it's not science, but it may be productive. A lot of people will hear "it's not so bad" and "healthy people should get it and get over it", and go out and make others sick (including people that could die or be hospitalized).

It's not science, it's crowd control. People don't exercise good judgement reliably, so that might be counterproductive.

That’s total nonsense. There are many reasons to believe the immunity is very very short.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jls106/galanti_shaman_ms_supp.pdf

No.

There is documented cases where people in the middle ages would deliberately take small doses of poison to develop inmunity to poison itself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

If people could deliberately infect yourself with a weak version of Covid19 , they would. Problem is strains are still somewhat poorly understood so its hard to understand who carries a tough strain vs weak one.

Yeah, but strong young healthy won't die from it, but grandma will. Best to self-infect and quarantine so you don't accidentily infect grandma. It's the civil thing to do.

That's wrong.

The probability of dying is much lower when you're young and without obvious preconditions, but there are twenty year old patients dying that seemed perfectly healthy.

That's an outlier.

Yes but it's still a significant risk, would you not say? The coronavirus outbreak itself could be described as an outlier event, should we discount it?

No, it's not a "significant risk". It's basically the flu to the young. The IFR for that age range in good health is basically in the ballpark of the flu, which is a rounding error.

Long term effects may be much more serious than Flu, as this thing eats your lungs and possibly other organs. Just looking at IFR is not enough.

We simply do not know yet whether it is a good idea to infect everyone.

Why is everyone here a medical expert?

It doesn't "eat into your lungs", and the great bulk of cases are mild.

> No, it's not a "significant risk". It's basically the flu to the young.

Normally being wrong on the internet is just ignorable, this isn't. At its best, this is 10x more deadly that the flu (more so for young people because almost no one dies of flu while young). You can dismiss that if you like, most people are right to not.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-younge...

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52003804

Reply on news.ycombinator.com