Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Something I see not often mentioned (as a long-sufferer of both of them) is that since COVID is much more highly contagious than either the standard set of flu virii OR the standard set of rhinovirii (common cold) (what I've read, IIRC, is that COVID is 3x more contagious than those: the median R0 for COVID is 5.7 https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-numb... and the flu has an R0 of 1.3 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/asia/china-co... and the cold, 1.5 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020404v..., see table 1), all the work we're doing to stop COVID transmission may be having an even greater effect on flu and cold transmission.

I talked to a biologist friend about the possibility of those being eradicated as an unintended positive side effect of our anti-COVID efforts, and he suggested that the animal kingdom unfortunately can serve as a zoological reservoir of some of these viruses and could potentially retransmit them back to humans, so it probably wouldn't entirely eradicate them, but it might certainly drastically hamper them for years.

I for one will be happy to take "will not experience a cold or flu for the next... who knows how many years" as a 2020 consolation prize.

Things I did not know while researching this comment:

The common cold costs the US economy $40 billion a year, and Amazon is secretly working on a cure: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/amazon-is-secretly-working-o...

The 2018 flu season cost businesses an estimated $15.4 billion https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/02/news/flu-season-business-co... and sufferers $10.4 billion in hospitalizations and outpatient expenses https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pdf/business/Toolkit_Seasonal_Flu_fo...

That seems to imply that the combined economic benefit of nearly eradicating both could result in an economic boon of $65 BILLION a year, and that's just in the United States! Not to mention all the people who won't die of the flu, etc...

> the animal kingdom unfortunately can serve as a "repository" (I forgot the word he used)

The term "reservoir" is used in this context.

Thank you. Comment is now edited.

I think R0 for the flu is usually take to be in the range 1.4-1.6 and for the common cold, 2-3. It's significant that it is quite a bit over 1, as it wouldn't spread so effectively if not.

It's an exponential factor, so small differences in the value make a big difference.

On the other hand, R0 for SARS-Cov-2 has been estimated as high as 6 by some groups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

I've added more accurate R0 values, with links to source for each, for COVID19, the flu, and the cold, to my original comment:

median R0 for COVID: 5.7

Flu: 1.3

Cold: 1.5

Of course, R0 is a context-sensitive value, so all this is debatable. But I think claiming COVID is 3x as contagious as the other 2 is not that far off the mark.

This could apply to COVID-19 as well:

'As SARS-CoV-2 has a novel receptor binding interface (compared to SARS) & circles the globe, opportunities for new animal reservoirs become available. We could suddenly see some common animal in the US being a reservoir for this virus for the future'

- http://microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-591/

i have no idea how trustworthy this source is but it looks like the flu/cold isn't handling covid19 protections and procedures very well.

"South Africa also has reported startling declines, with doctors saying there haven't been a sufficient number of flu cases to even report that the seasonal epidemic happened. And in Australia, the country's National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System recorded only 85 new laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza in the last two weeks of June—a stark difference from the 22,047 confirmed cases recorded during the same time last year."

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/07/24/coronavir...

I guess, unless it's zero though, exponential growth will cause it to eventually reach its last-year equilibrium again... :(

but 1 flu or cold sufferer only infects an average of 1 other person)

If that was the case then flu or colds wouldn’t spread the way they do.

There is not just one cold virus, there are many. So the 1-1 average sounds reasonable.

yeah, I've corrected the data and the claim in the original comment

I hope that even if this situation doesn't eradicate other diseases, it at least pushes us to take more care with infectious disease in general.

Since I've been exposed over the last few months to roughly a million people claiming that COVID19 is no worse than the flu, it prompted me to look up just how many people die or are hospitalized from the flu every year.

US avg annual deaths (prev 9 years): 37,000

US avg annual hospitalizations (prev 9 years): 446,000

Clearly COVID19 is worse than this already (160k deaths, 317k hospitalizations, and more every day).

But put aside the COVID19 comparison, and that is still a lot of people who suffer or die from something that we have tools to prevent. How much of that could be avoided with better flu vaccine uptake, policies that support staying at home when you're sick, and the normalization of wearing masks in public?

Why weren't we already doing all of those things? I only did one of those things, and that feels kind of dumb now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com