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Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

At least until something better comes along.

Wouldn't it be sufficient to just keep it up until you reach a point where you've had a couple weeks with no known active cases in your country? (Assuming similar for the rest of the world, with travel restrictions or quarantines on people traveling from places where there are active cases).

In places with good contact tracing, they should mostly be able to keep it at near zero after that point by tracing and self-quarantine, occasionally needing to use the vaccine on a whole city if you find that you had a super-spreader event.

In places without good contract tracing, it would be similar except the threshold at which you need to vaccinate the city would be lower.

That’s assuming that everyone in your city is vaccinated, and that the vaccine is 100% effective.

We’ve had a measles vaccine for three generations, we still have the measles.

We’ve had a polio vaccine for three generations, polio is not eliminated.

i'm very pro-vaccine in general (grew up in USSR and, until coming to US, didn't know that "anti-vaccine" can even exist in modern society :), yet recently and very surprisingly for myself i caught myself thinking that i will be very hesitant about getting a vaccine which is rushed through Trump's FDA to meet election day targeting schedule and to get the first dibs on the Operation Warp Speed billions - i think Trump's second term is a direct function of whether he'd triumphantly announce vaccine in the last week of October or not, and i fully expect that he would. Choosing between such a vaccine and a straight coronavirus with well-known low risk profile for my group - i'm still undecided :) So, i'd guess there would be a lot of people who wouldn't be rushing to get the vaccine.

If you're still a citizen of Russia, I believe you could get Russian vaccine instead, they are making a good progress too

i'd say that is a great "English humor" level joke, and i can only respond in Russian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smn8CFhV3Mg

Seriously, though, i wonder why would Russia be developing coronavirus vaccine if most people these days die there from "atypical pneumonia" and not from coronavirus ... at least if one is to believe the official info.

> up until you reach a point where you've had a couple weeks with no known active cases in your country?

This point never came for influenza anywhere, why would you think it will come for COVID19, a much more contagious and invisible in many more cases virus?

Is that the same influenza that keeps spreading year over year? Can you please explain how does the virus stay viable over long periods of time without spreading from host to host?

I would very much like a real explanation for this question from some expert in virology. But I just assume in some kind of similar way to how measles came back in Canada among the antivax community in recent years.

They are anti-vaxxers, yes, so no wonder that they could technically get measles, but where did it come from? It was completely irradicated because most people had the immunity. The virus should have died off and disappeared from the face of the planet. And yet here were are. There must mechanisms for viruses to survive this.

30% of USA and especially Trump voters won't take the vaccine.

Is the antivaxxer movement really at 30%?!

well the president of the USA is an anti-vaxxer...

I'd be curious how long, and how much money would be required, to ramp up vaccine production to 20+ billion doses/year.

Just spitballing here, but I'd expect it's several orders of magnitude cheaper than keeping the economy shut down for the same duration.

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