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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Is there reasonable hope for a virus like this to be completely eliminated? I figure if it's in that sweet spot of contagiousness, incubation time and mortality, it's hard to eradicate completely. And unless it's eradicated completely, we'll absolutely have to live with reduced efficiency in hyper-alert testing of anyone with symptoms, unless we find that it ceases to be a serious problem once humans have had contact with it.

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I'm not qualified to answer that;

but as a layman I share your concern. From lay reading it seems that the large organisations were hoping that situations like this could be arrested at source or in the early stages.

To double down on my earlier comment; the inefficiencies the disease cause are not strictly the testing etc.

Look at the regular flu [1] [2] it has been "measured" as costing economies some pretty significant sums every year ($87bn USA, £1.35bn UK, different standards used); of course this could be said to pale against the size of these leading economies [3] landing at less than 1%. An annual flu tax is certianly not ideal.

Additional diseases will have different "tax rates", and I have no idea to the way in which they will interact.

You have to bear in mind that a tax rate is a form of inhibitive cost, and the burden of disease could be holding other economies back.

[1] https://www.cdcfoundation.org/pr/flu-costs-United-States-87-...

[2] https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/flu-costs-the-b...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Bubonic plague, tuberculosis and polio still exist outside the West, but they don't cause much inefficiency here. I doubt doing some ongoing testing for SARS now that it's been mostly eliminated in Asia will permanently cripple Asia's economies. The inefficiencies of continued outbreaks on less well organized nations are harder to predict but possibly much larger.

I'm not sure the person you're responding to was using it in this sense, but the word "eliminate," in epidemiological terms, means to get the virus under control such that outbreaks are reduced in scope to local clusters that can be dealt with using methods like contact tracing. In that sense, yes, we absolutely can, and should, eliminate this virus.

You're right - I was using it in a totality sense. While I know enough to know it won't get there the point was to draw the extreme and highlight that deaths aren't the only cost on the scale from here to there.

Unlikely, as it can be passed to animals, then mutate and return to humans. The flu vaccine is designed and distributed annually based on the most likely strains. My guess is a similar pattern for strains of coronavirus.

It probably depends on how long acquired immunity lasts, which we don't know yet. People remain immune to some diseases, like measles, for a lifetime after surviving the disease or being vaccinated. Immunity to other diseases, like influenza, disappears quickly (even immunity to the same strain lasts less than a year).[1]

If COVID-19 is in the latter category, it will be difficult to control and we'll probably have to learn to live with it, as we have learned to live with the flu causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year worldwide.

1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines...

That likely depends on how effective we are at eliminating it in the coming months. I doubt it will become endemic in Korea or Singapore.

I wonder if even influenza could be erraticated in the coming years with mass testing and contact tracing. The lockdowns ended flu season early this year.

We'd have to eliminate it worldwide, or it would travel from country to country like the flu does.

In particular, from Mexico. There's too much travel between the US and Mexico to prevent it from crossing the border, and there are 50,000 confirmed cases in Mexico already, with roughly 2000 more being found every day.

Given the relative number of cases, Mexico should be stopping travel from the US, not the other way around.

Reducing travel from Mexico has been a popular position in the Us for decades.

Let's not discount pharmacological options. HIV doesn't have a vaccine, yet it can be fought with a proper (admittedly very complex) drug regime.

The same can be probably done for SARS-CoV-2, although we'll have to wait for specific drugs to reach better efficiency.

And I add, we don't need to make this virus disappear (it would be better, but even with a very efficient vaccine it is unlikely). If we can prevent hospitalizations (and possibly deaths), we can likely live with it like we did with many other pathogens.

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