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Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

This disease will never be "eradicated" and it is not helpful to use that word to discuss policy decisions. Sars CoV-2 has numerous animal reservoirs and an incredible transmission rate. It will never be gone from this Earth.

We will get vaccines and we will come up with better treatments negating its effects, but this coronavirus is here to stay. It will be a fifth endemic human coronavirus.

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There are a lot of coronaviruses and all tend to become mild overtime. In 1800, Influenza killed thousands of people daily. This endured through the 19th century,

Coronaviruses also have plagued humanity in the same way, for instance look up “bovine coronavirus”

Case in point, these poor things ...

"Denmark to cull millions of minks after mutated coronavirus spreads to people"

- https://www.euronews.com/2020/11/05/denmark-to-cull-millions...

Only time will tell. At the beginning of the pandemic the strategy was to simple hold out until a vaccine is found (Which is the strategy developed for influenza). Doing lockdowns reducing the infection rates to almost nothing or even eradicating it in some countries was seen as impossible. Yet that’s exactly what we did. I think eradication is possible.

Can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this - but this is exactly true. Since the virus has a non-human animal reservoir that means that even if every human receives the vaccine, all it takes is re-transmission from the animal reservoir back into the human population after the immunity period expires.

This means we'll probably have to receive Covid vaccination on a regular basis along with the flu vaccine in order to maintain a permanent broad-scale immunity. At least until we have a radical new treatment for this family of viruses that can confer a "permanent" immunity - something that for now is in the realm of science fiction.

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