So as expected the immune system response is the same as with other coronaviruses.
There is a lot of confusion around herd immunity. Think of it more like an equilibrium state than an elimination state. It is where this virus will end up whether we have a perfectly sterilizing vaccine or not.
Longer term it gets interesting because young people are at a dramatically lower risk of death and older people will have been exposed several times. So, if things go endemic it’s likely for long term annual deaths to be dramatically lower.
PS: The error bars in what you linked are very wide repressing significant uncertainty around those tests.
Herd immunity does not.
So while less virus circulating due to greater population immunity (and therefore lower individual risk of infection) is good, it doesn't help when SARS-CoV-2 does chance into a nursing home.
People seem to always assume independent identical random variables. Corona Virus are seasonal - infections highly locally clustered.
The spreading might refuse to follow slow brownian motion of the herd. If e.g. an aircondition blasts an entire room of people with bad air, how much do herd effects really help?
Does the term "herd immunity" make sense for a seasonal virus at all?
Yes. For instance, one of the benefits of widespread flu vaccination is that it slows the rate that the virus spreads at. Herd immunity is just the threshold where enough people have immunity that the spread diminishes. That we don't necessarily reach the threshold doesn't make the lesser effect useless.
So herd immunity is not about immunity. Quite a misnomer then! Always thought herd immunity protected those still vulnerable, but according to you it merely means the vulnerable may merely be having a few more healthy hours falling sick non the less.
Low level zero friction school physics analogy: think of a ball rolling onto an inclined plane. If the plane is angled upwards the ball will slow down and eventually stop rolling further upwards, if the plane is angled downwards it will just continue accelerating forever. But in the upwards case no place on the plane is truly safe from getting reached by the ball, because speed and angle is not specified. Herd immunity means that the slope is upwards, but the velocity would still be an open-ended random distribution.
A more accurate model for virus spread would replace momentum with dice rolls and slope with success thresholds, but that's just more difficult to imagine (unless your biography contains a phase of obsessing over p&p rpg rules).
An individual has immunity when the immune response is triggered. By definition. It was very confusing to me at first before I caught on to the meaning of the term.
It makes sense when you think about it. Can you "get" the virus a second time? Of course of can. That doesn't contradict the fact that you have some level of "immunity".
After all, the immune response is a big part of what most of us feel when getting sick.
The thing is, looking at the seasonality of the other strains of coronaviruses, you can see how it kind of looks to what we had this year (only worse as no one was ever infected with this). See Fig. 1 here : https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20224
But people do sure like to blame and shame everyone in Europe and the US as if 1 billion people in the Northern hemisphere are somehow all to blame they weren't compliant enough. Viruses will doo what they always did.
There is no ‘they are much freer’ argument in the diverse states, because people are dealing with this thing in a huge diversity of ways. Some people have exactly the same life, but they wear a mask, no big deal...
China just had an outbreak of hundreds cases in the Uighur region.
What seems more likely: that China has truly "stopped" the virus, and it just re-appeared, miraculously, in one of the most heavily travel restricted places on earth...or that it's actually spreading in China, and testing isn't catching it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54687533
Also, you'll note the following quote in the story linked above:
"Asymptomatic cases are not counted in China's official tally of 85,810 confirmed infections."
As for South Korea, it still has regular outbreaks, including some large ones:
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-pandemics-india-ar...
Taiwan's success at managing the virus has come ~entirely from strict border controls. Being a tiny island nation certainly helps with this. They still have cases, but so far, they're all amongst travelers:
https://time.com/5905129/taiwan-coronavirus-record/
The overall picture here is that some nations have done better than others at controlling the virus (at considerable expense) but almost nobody can claim to have "stopped" it.
-----------
Yet, no lockdown.
No country managed the disease better than Taiwan. We should learn from Taiwan. See [1] for an analysis of Taiwan's response from early March 2020.
It is interesting to reflect upon why most countries ignored Taiwan. The World Health Organization's locking out Taiwan on China's request is probably one reason. Is it the only one?
[1] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/
Taiwan is a tiny island, with relatively little international travel (compared to the US, China, etc). If they have no cases internally, and they seal the borders before those cases are introduced, then almost nothing else matters. Small, isolated, island countries can do this -- but even then (i.e. New Zealand) one mistake will mean rapid endemic spread. So sure, as long as Taiwan continues to effectively isolate itself from the outside world, they can probably carry on. But they're not going to: they're already talking about re-establishing travel with the rest of Asia.
It's virtually impossible for a country like the US to do the same thing Taiwan did. Even if we could seal the borders like Taiwan, our population is about 13 times larger, we have large land borders with other countries, and a proportionally large number of expatriate residents with right-of-return. Even with our bans on international travelers, the US has had 6.6 million foreign arrivals in 2020 [1]. Effectively 25% of the entire population of Taiwan has arrived in the US in 2020. And that's just non-citizens.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/visitor-arrivals-program-i-94-data
Yeah, but this one can cause lasting cardiovascular and nervous system damage in a significant number of people, in addition to permanent lung damage. It's not just another respiratory disease.
a) quantification and definition of lasting cardiovascular/ nervous system damage
b) quantification of a significant number of people
c) comparisons to rates comparable to other respiratory diseases (like influenza strains or the bird flu strains etc. )
Understand I ask this not as a coronavirus skeptic, but as a science-literacy proponent who hasn't yet read any reliable source or study for the claim you're making.
If someone proclaims to know the long term effects of a recent novel virus, that's an interesting claim. then they compare the outcomes to other viruses (or declare its fundamentally different), that's also interesting.
I've seen news articles about specific cases, and alarmist tabloid-esque case studies, but as someone who actually reads medical studies, I don't let media or hand-picked cases set my opinion, because in a pandemic with countless millions infected, and with a disease that disproportionately affects co morbid patients, of course one will find individual reports of bad cases and complications. But the information I asked for is presumably the minimum required for your claim to be justified. And if it is so "prevailing", it would be widespread and easily findable, whereas I have yet to see a single source that has them.
To put it technically, it is "inappropriate to draw substantive conclusions on the basis of a lack of statistically significant effects." You are not proving the null-hypothesis, you are failing to demonstrate the alternative hypothesis.
Or to put it another way, lack of evidence is not evidence that a thing doesn't exist.
My good man, i propose that outside of news stories focusing on relatively small samples and individual case studies, which generally make no comparison to other virus' comparative effects or mention of the biases inherent in their sample, it is no longer being reported because it has not yet been established.
And the reason for this is nothing conspiratorial or denialist, but just due to the fundamentals of good science: that is to say, it's REALLY REALLY hard to accurately establish the long-term effects of a novel virus that has only been around in the human population for the short-term.
The long term studies showing what you are asking are only just starting to show results - but everything we see so far shows that this is causing more issues, in more people than flu.
Also of note, a partner of my wife's friend got covid (positive test) back in April with only light symptoms. Just got it again (tested again) and is very ill this time - had to go to hospital but wasn't kept in. So immunity might not be what we think.
But it's possible to seek out new information on covid, and also to seek to stop spreading disinformation on it, while still accepting its serious nature.
It felt like we spent 3 months trying to convince doctors here that long covid was even a thing, then another couple helping them understand how they can help people like my wife and it is only that last couple of months that there has been a mobilisation of research and interest in this area, so good quality information is currently hard to find.
CoverScan.com moved quite early - https://coverscan.com/news-%26-updates - have done some great work and are starting to release info - my wife was part of the trial. I'm sure there are others, but these things take time.
I'm sure that we will have loads of useful data points next year, but right now even the collection of the data has been poor to understand anything other than just 'deaths' and in some countries 'recoveries' (which was generally just a measure of those that were ill enough to be hospitalised)
To me, it's not the position that Covid has long term effects that's incredulous, because we know that a proportion of a lot of viral infections can develop into longer term complications and effects. But it's the idea/observation that the longer term effects are both comparatively worse than other viruses, and splitting the quantumn of those effects into a "general covid effect" (that is to say, the probability of the effect for a given case of covid), and those of a "general pandemic effect" (that is to say, the population-size effect of having all these infections happening at once due to a relatively vulnerable population with little immunity, in contrast to some of the older/other viruses).
But I admit myself a little more than disturbed how every time I ask to see comparable figures/studies to see how we have knowledge of long-term effects of a virus that's only been around for the short-term, and claims that are usually made without any reference to the viruses to which covid needs to be compared, that I generally get hit by a quick wave of downvotes.
Come join some of the long covid reddit, Facebook, slack or other groups if you want to research first hand - there are plenty out there!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
>In the UK, where it is (often incorrectly) known as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), 150 000 people are said to be affected. Other terms used for the condition are postviral fatigue syndrome (PVFS) and chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS). Symptoms may begin suddenly, sometimes after an acute viral infection, and commonly include incapacitating and persistent fatigue, muscle aches, joint pains, weakness after exercise, headaches, swollen glands, digestive disorders, inability to concentrate, memory loss, recurring minor infections or low-grade fevers, depression, an increasing sense of being unable to function, sleep disturbance, light sensitivity, food intolerance and environmental allergies.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/myocarditis/s...
> Viruses. Many viruses are commonly associated with myocarditis, including the viruses that cause the common cold (adenovirus); COVID-19; hepatitis B and C; parvovirus, which causes a mild rash, usually in children (fifth disease); and herpes simplex virus.
Also the 'new' symptoms the long covid sufferers face are often very different to the initial illness - my wifes heart function was impacted hugely, only just starting to recover 7 months later.
What is good is that unlike ME, it appears many of the long covid sufferers are recovering, it just takes a long time, similar to SARs - where as for many ME is a life long condition. So I wouldn't draw to many parallels just yet until we know more.
All of the evidence suggests that immunity against coronaviruses is quite durable.
The only reason that other coronaviruses like OC43 don't kill a lot of people is that almost everyone catches it first as a youth, and builds up a level of immunity. But it can be quite deadly to someone who first catches it later in life, or to immunocompromised patients.
As an aside, OC43 is strongly suspected to be the cause of the 1889-1890 pandemic which killed around 1 million.
Reference: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3838/viruses-or-...