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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

We may have to aim for virus extinction. Simply flattening the curve means we are aiming for herd immunity, but there are worrying signs that immunity may only last a few months, making it possible to recirculate. The science isn't settled, but I think until we know more we should be more conservative.

https://bgr.com/2020/08/11/coronavirus-immunity-common-cold-...

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This virus cannot be eradicated. You'd have to force everyone on the planet to isolate for 2 weeks. Simply impossible.

Not sure two weeks really work anyway. In a large household with lots of space and people living different lifestyles, if someone was infected at the start of the lockdown, not everyone is guaranteed to get infected at the same time. We could end up with someone being infected near the end of the lockdown and they then go out into public and spread it around while thinking everything is safe because of the lockdown. My brother's mother-in-law lives in a basement suite in his house. She has her own small kitchen, bathroom, and external door. She's the type who could end up getting infected and be contagious at the end of the lockdown. Then one trip to the grocery store and now the town has a cluster of infections despite the lockdown.

And there are animal reservoirs. Even if we temporarily eradicated the virus from all humans we would just catch it from animals again and the pandemic would start all over.

No expert I'm familiar with believes that it's possible to drive the virus extinct, at least not without decades of work.

Well, give me another strategy in the case that re-circulation is possible. We can wait for a vaccine, which sometimes (highly variable!) is better than getting the bug itself, but that's all I can think of.

I'm not sure what you mean. There's no perfect strategy, only tradeoffs - how much are we willing to spend and how much are we willing to sacrifice for what degree of suppression? The ideal scenario is for Covid-19 to end up something like tuberculosis or HIV, a serious public health issue but not one that the average person necessarily needs to think about day to day.

If someone tells you that they have a plan to stop the coronavirus from being a public health issue at all, they're misinformed or untruthful.

Virus eradication is flatly impossible. That will never happen in our lifetimes, even with an effective vaccine.

The best evidence we have indicates that recovered patients will retain a high level of immunity for at least several years.

https://www.jimmunol.org/content/early/2020/09/03/jimmunol.2...

Thanks for the link. I wasn't able to download the full article though (couldn't access sci hub either). :-/ The abstract of the article says they are merely making (informed) speculation though.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought it would be similar to a more deadly flu or something with long-lived immunity for a given strain once you got it. At this point, I am assuming less and less. We found it wasn't even a lung disease, but a disease of the angiotensin system. We assumed ventilators would help, but often they just mushed damaged lung tissue. There's been tons of snake-oil cures floating around too. People are starting to show evidence of long term damage. Let's measure things before we make irreversible decisions.

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