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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

So... if that plays out, perhaps split the doses in half, cover twice the people, so we can all go back to our normal pre-COVID life (or what's left of it).

Of course this won't double the number of people vaccinated since Moderna doesn't cover 100%. But every little helps.

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We're not going back to pre covid lives period. Even if everyone was vaxxed there would still be more moderate cases that our hospitals can handle. And then that allows the virus millions of chances to mutate and then, just like we're seeing with the UK and South Africa strains. Which as we're seeing all but nullifies the vaccine. The vaccines we're seeing are only 10% effective against the SA strain. Statistically >5% is great, but that's not a risk the vast majority of people want to run with.

The vaccines we're seeing are only 10% effective against the SA strain.

This is not accurate.

The AZ vaccine was only 10% effective in a study in SA. That's the only one that was shown to be vastly less effective.

The Pfizer vaccine is believed to be effective against the SA variant (though I think it used In Vitro studies) and there are lots of other vaccines on the way. We will get this under control but it will be a long slow process over several years.

So far it is the only one.

I believe Moderna was also shown to be effective.

Astrazeneca is not an mRNA vaccine so there’s that

> We're not going back to pre covid lives period.

We are. Most people, myself included, won't accept living like this forever. If vaccination fails and no treatment will be found, we'll expand healthcare capacity and accept that people will die.

Didn’t we move this way with the flu?

People couldn't behave back then for real reasons, most people that are the problem today are just spoiled brats. Back then they didn't have the century of epidemiology knowledge that was outright ignored and trivialized.

We're already taxing our medical system. Personnel will wear down.

Hence I said to expand healthcare capacity. If there's not enough personnel, we should educate and hire more personnel. I'm not saying this is something we should do tomorrow -- only in the hypothetical case that we haven't found an effective prevention and/or cure in 5 years or so.

Pausing the entire global economy for 5 weeks would be vastly less costly than training personnel while we deal with it for 5 years.

I do get that it would never happen, because people would refuse to do it (their belief that it wouldn't work would, in a sublime irony, prevent it from working).

Can you put a figure on 'pausing the global economy for 5 weeks'? How do you know it would be less expensive? The global economy is massive so you'll have to provide some well reasoned figures to support such a claim. Such a pause could easily trigger much larger problems, how do you know it wouldn't? And why did you pick five weeks? The disease won't be eliminated in five weeks of everyone doing nothing; plus a lot of the global economy is essential to human civilisation.

The net cost would be very small. There would be a planned period of increased activity prior and a period of make up after. And then you'd have 5 years of the economy running without a pandemic to make up any loss.

Substitute some other plan of coordinated action for the five weeks if you want. I don't care to argue about it, it's clear from New Zealand and Taiwan and so on that coordinated action works very well, if it is made to happen. It's also reasonably clear that it's cheaper than dealing with a raging pandemic.

You said 'pause the global economy', and now wish for me to substitute in any other effective plan, which kind of begs the question, doesn't it?

Right, I was just suggesting a severe coordinated action for the sake of making the comment. I don't care about convincing you.

So not only do you admit it would never happen, you cannot even provide any actual figures to support your claim. New Zealand and Taiwan have had success because they effectively eliminated the disease at the start of the pandemic, they didn't shut down with 30% of their population infected and millions of current infections, which is why that particular comparison is poor.

It isn't unreasonable to ask for justification of your claim that it'd be so much cheaper to shut down the global economy or take 'severe' action at this time. So, thanks for providing absolutely nothing beyond some vague claims about ideal actions that won't happen?

Yeah, you should probably discount my comment if those are problems for you.

It may be helpful to look at HN comments more as a discussion forum than a peer reviewed journal with documented justification for claims and so on.

The efficacy number is about preventing cases of Covid-19, but in fact, even the "low" efficacy vaccines are extremely good at preventing severe illness and death. Once we get everyone vaccinated, we should be good.

https://www.vox.com/22273502/covid-vaccines-pfizer-moderna-j...

If we vaccinate enough people to get the fatally rate well below the flu there is absolutely no reason not to go back to the old way. There is no 100% safe but there is a level at which hospitals are not overwhelmed and people are accepting the risk of being alive.

Wow. You’ve really been hitting the doomer echo chambers hard, huh? Literally nothing in your post is accurate.

There's no point in sending people with Covid to the hospital. We can't cure viral infections anyways, all it does is just facilitate spread.

Eventually we'll just figure out prophylactic measures for those groups most at risk and leave it at that. It's what we do already with the "common cold", even though the cold can be very dangerous and deadly to some people.

You don't send everyone with covid (or a cold) to the hospital, but if they're having trouble breathing you certainly do, and of course there are things that can be done there to help. Even at the beginning of the pandemic before the disease was well understood mortality was several times higher without access to hospital. Now as more has been learned the standard of care has improved further. Just because they can't wave a wand and cure the virus doesn't mean they can't do anything.

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