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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

I'm far more worried about the FDA and logistics than technical limitations.

Even if you could make this fix in a day, it'll take months to get FDA approval, and then you still have to manufacture and distribute it. And by that time the populous will have gotten immunity the old fashion way.

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Indeed. And the likelihood of escape are worse the greater the infected population x time to new vaccine. I'm increasingly worried that covid-19 is the slow loris of viruses. Too slow and mild to warrant panic-mode measures (I don't mean lockdowns), just gonna be an annual millimation of the population.

Aren't we in panic mode measures already? I'm not sure there's much more most countries can realistically implement even if there's a 10x more lethal variant.

During initial containment china welded apartments shut and organized essentials deliveries by dedicated couriers for each city block. And then there's the option of military-enforced cordons. There are multiple levels of panic left untapped.

That's why I said "most countries", because in (say) the US the government couldn't pull that off even if they tried. (For one thing, it's hard to weld shut suburban housing.)

Perhaps, but if the virus was as transmissible as sars-cov-2, but had a much higher fatality rate (say 60% like Ebola). Then you would get a lot more support for strict measures amongst the general population.

I think Parents point was that eventually we will have to give up on panic mode and accept deaths from this each year.

I said "not lockdowns". I meant things like "strip down the phase testing" etc.

I see no evidence we are doing that.

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