Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the bigger picture I think the world will suffer from those countries that handle Covid the worst because the virus will not disppear in those countries and it has time to mutate there until it reaches a state that can evade the vaccines and then re-infect the other countries.

View on HN

Several epidemiologist are trying to warn the developed nations that the current battle for covid vaccines provisioning is doing the world a disservice since it allows the virus to mutate in parts of the world that can't compete economically for vaccine shots (Manaus, South Africa, etc.)

But Nash equilibrium is still more powerful than everything else ...

That doesn't matter. Any person that isn't vaccinated is a potential source of a mutation. It doesn't matter where that person is.

Once a country reaches herd immunity, then by all means get vaccines to other countries, but until then non-vaccinated people are fungible.

You are forgetting animal hosts. Numerous other species also transmit.

Same thing: those animal hosts are everywhere. There is no particular reason to expect that an animal host in Isreal won't be the source of the next mutation (Israel is currently number 1 in per-capita vaccination)

Since we don't have enough doses or dosing capacity yet to make anywhere reach herd immunity, not even tiny Israel (although hopefully they are getting close), it's not like shipping everything to South Africa would change anything. Also, given the refrigeration requirements of the early vaccines, shipping it to lower income countries would probably just increase the chance of some of the doses spoiling.

Really, it's in virtually every country, so there's not a place on Earth where it's not mutating.

Given that the virus is shown to infect other animals, there is no opportunity to limit mutations, let alone eradication.

Natural reservoirs of covid-19 means we'll all need boosters yearly for the rest of our lives.

Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of this, but cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, and mink is a lot of other mammal species already proven to be able to pass it on. I think we will never live in a covid-19 free world again, it will be like measles; always in circulation, but hopefully we get effective vaccines against it.

Animals carry lots of nasty diseases, Ebola, rabies, SARS, MERS, etc., yet these are under control in large parts of the world, thanks to basic hygiene. If we were willing to follow e.g. New Zealand's example, committing to actually applying what we have learned about containing local outbreaks, maybe we couldn't eradicate SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, but we could do so much better at controlling it, allowing us to largely go back to normality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com