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Comment by klmadfejno | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?

We’d be much happier with Astra-Zeneca.

If this hit 20 years ago I suspect that we wouldn't have perceived anything but the tip of the iceberg of people who actually die or get close, because PCR was much less industrialized back then. And the big invisible "underwater part" of young or lucky people who don't get bad Covid but still serve the virus as transmitter relays would have made it a very strong, short wave. Likely mass graves in every part of the world, but mostly over I think by late summer 2020.

And so much individual suffering, because Covid deaths seem to be pretty far from peacefully dozing off. On this scale, which is orthogonal to all the usual metrics, I believe that it's considerably worse than 1918. If this virus had hit us before we got the tools for asymptomatic detection it would have likely lead to quite a few changes in our approach to end of life care, instead of the extra progress we now see in our utilization of the mRNA toolbox.

It's not luck, Covid is likely as bad as it is because we're so terrible overweight and unhealthy.

There is evidence that obesity and other lifestyle are making Covid-19 worse than it could have been.

But we'll ignore and just enable a continuely growing health problem of obesity.

https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/151/1/9/5981716

>I believe that it's considerably worse than 1918.

The COVID IFR is known to be lower than that of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people in less than a year, and pulled that off at a time when the Earth's population was a quarter of what it is today and much less mobile. I have no idea whatsoever where you get the idea that COVID is worse than 1918. It most emphatically (at least so far) is not at all showing itself to be as bad, let alone worse.

OP was talking about the “quality of death” being subjectively worse IMO.

If it was describing that as "worse", didn't leave it very clear, and in any case, that's an awfully ambiguous comparison. Death from influenza was slowly asphyxiating, and sometimes even hemorrhagic, neither of which sound especially peaceful.

Using a vaccine created by one of the many other mechanisms that are in the pipeline, like the Oxford or J&J vaccines.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

But if this happened 20 years ago it'd have been before SARS, and thus we would also not have the head start provided by all of that research

I'd assume the traditional route of using virus particles for the vaccine would be used. In fact, I think that's what the Chinese and Russians are using.

Pretty screwed for at least another year.

I appear to have angered the.... I actually don't know.

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