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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

Say the US gets to herd immunity and the rest of the world has done a really good job at containing the virus, e.g. New Zealand. What are they realistically going to do long term? Shut up their country until a vaccine arrives? Quarantine everyone coming in or going out for two weeks? Who is realistically going to want to travel into or out of there with those kind of restrictions. I seriously wonder if the short term pain isn’t just worth it. It’s cold and calloused but it’s either vaccine or a long drawn out constant state of fear and social distancing. The other option is short burst of mass deaths followed by a return to complete normalcy.

So my question is more like, how are countries that, in say six months, that’s population only have 10% exposed to COVID-19 going to coexist in a global world with countries that are past herd immunity and operating freely again.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-polio_syndrome

Covid is a new disease. Will it have long term effects?

Chickenpox -> shingles is another example.

And HIV -> AIDS of course.

Coronavirus are not a new type of disease though.

This one is. Colds seem to be inconsequential (although there are questions about ME). SARS and MERS are rare and were either very deadly or very life altering. Covid seems to fall in the middle. Hopefully the long term effects for the majority will be similar to colds.

No human vaccines have ever been tested for any coronavirus.

There are already articles of people who have recovered that will have to take anti-coagulants for the rest of their life.

Please don't take this as being directed explicitly towards your comment. But why does anyone think there is such a thing as herd immunity for Covid-19?

I've been following the research since December/January on New England Journal of Medicine, Virological.org, Lancet etc. And I think there is not yet enough evidence to suggest that there is immunity conferred by contracting Covid-19.

Does anyone know of any studies claiming that "herd" immunity is even possible with Covid-19? The latest article I could find is: COVID-19 and Postinfection Immunity https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2766097

If there is no immunity or limited immunity conferred from infection then Covid-19 will be with the USA and other countries that have given up on control measures for a long time.

> But why does anyone think there is such a thing as herd immunity for Covid-19?

I suppose this depends on what the null hypothesis is? Is the null hypothesis "You have immunity after being infected" or is it "You don't have immunity after being infected". You assume it's the latter and you're saying there's not enough evidence to reject it. But you could just as well assume it is "You have immunity after being infected" and we're gathering evidence to see whether that can be rejected or not.

Yes it seems that New Zealand will attempt to wait for a vaccine and in the mean time impose a quarantine on anyone who arrives from another country. Balaji Srinivasan thinks we will see the world divided into "red" zones where the virus is still widespread and ”green" zones where the virus has been contained. Travelers will be able to move fairly freely between green zones countries. So if you're in Taiwan you might be able to visit Australia or New Zealand without a quarantine.

https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY2...

Considering for most countries the published numbers are very debatable (even in Europe there are plenty of arguments), imho that’s a foolish strategy. Quarantine should probably be implemented worldwide. I say that against my best interests, I am long overdue a holiday, but I don’t want to feel my lungs full of water.

> imho that’s a foolish strategy.

Possibly for most, but for New Zealand and Australia it looks ok.

This is already happening, see these rules for foreign travel published by the Czech ministry of health:

https://www.mvcr.cz/mvcren/article/coronavirus-information-o...

There is a map with green, orange and green countries.

UK and Sweden are red, most of western Europe orange.

For green countries, Czech citizens can go there and back without the need to present negative tests results and enter quarantine. Same thing for residents and nationals of those countries.

For orange countries, Czech citizens can go there and back without the need to present negative tests results and enter quarantine. Residents and nationals of those countries are banned from entering Czech Republic.

For red countries, Czech citizens can go there but need to present negative tests results and enter quarantine. Residents and nationals of those countries are banned from entering Czech Republic.

You're seriously saying that a "short burst of mass deaths" is a better option than getting your shit together and doing proper social distancing followed by proper contact tracing?

It's great that we've got rid of the virus for now in NZ, but yes, there are many questions, including whether there will still be an incentive to even try for a vaccine once major countries reach herd immunity (if and when that happens).

But it truly astonishes and depresses me that the US - the country that went to the moon, that invented the internet, that built a military capability that literally saved the world in ww2 - seems to have given up.

How hard would it really be to do proper contact tracing in a population of 300 million? Yes it's a big job, a very hard job, but the big jobs, the tough jobs, that's what Americans do!

> the US - the country that went to the moon, that invented the internet, that built a military capability that literally saved the world in ww2

two of those are in part result of propaganda

I've read a fair bit of military history, and I'm fairly confident the moon landings were not done using a green screen, so please elaborate on which 2 of these are not true.

Maybe "saved the world" and "invented" the internet? Because yeah of course, the internet has been "invented"! It was absolutely not a natural evolution of local networking based on known technology...

Through that sort of reasoning, computers have never been invented. They are just a natural evolution of mechanical calculators. I mean, sure, but that definition of "invent" is so narrow as to be meaningless.

Internet is a US invention as much as lightbulbs are a US invention.

I said partly. Regarding the internet the US had a central role in developing and implementing the technology and infrastructure, as is testified by the fact that our current domain system is still US-centric, but in a sense they did not invent it.

Regarding defeating the axis and specifically Germany (Italy was not a military colossus) there is data that shows that the USSR had a bigger impact in defeating the nazis.

No one denies the contributions of the US in both of those feats, but also it is undeniable that the narrative isn't always factually true.

>> the US - the country that went to the moon, that invented the internet, that built a military capability that literally saved the world in ww2 > two of those are in part result of propaganda

Eh, no.

We (the USA) did really go to the moon, though I know some USA citizens dispute that.

It was really USA universities and corporations (with DARPA funding) that built the foundations of Ethernet, TCP/IP and the Internet. Yes, plenty of contributions from others (including foreign grad students), but still, USA institutions.

The USA produced a lot of war material for all the Allies in WW2. A lot went to the USSR to keep them in the fight. This in no way should diminish the absolutely unprecedented loss and sacrifice of the USSR peoples in the Great Patriotic War, who bore the brunt of it. But without the USA, I really doubt the Allies could have stopped the Axis powers.

"I really doubt the Allies could have stopped the Axis powers"

It was a team effort - without combined efforts of the USA and the Soviets (and to a lesser extent the UK) the Axis powers might have prevailed.

Wow incredible! Apparently, the USA have also developed the world's most potent propaganda machine.

That has always been the case. George Washington and the cherry tree comes to mind. And so it began.

Sometime near the end of the cold war I realized that the West's propaganda machine was in fact better than the Soviet version. Nobody in the USSR believed "Pravda" but everybody believed the NBC Nightly News. :)

One might argue however that we need such a mechanism since in 2020, as the Scots might say:

"People can ni' agree on the color o' Shite"

In addition - regarding the European theater, the most important contribution of the US was keeping the USSR to the Elbe, otherwise the entirety of continental Europe would have fallen under communist rule.

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