Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

For people arguing that not being part of a risk group is a reason not to protect yourself, please take a lesson from brazil. Being part of a 'high risk group' does not saves you from infecting other people who are part of such groups.

That's basically what happened in brazil: people who were not part of risk groups crowded, encouraged by the president himself[0][1][2]. The number of infected poeple soared and variants that affect younger people appeared[3][4]. The health system has now collapsed because there is not enough ICU for such a high number of ill people[5][6].

[0] https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/politica/2021/02/26/intern...

[1] https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2021/0...

[2] https://cultura.uol.com.br/noticias/15258_bolsonaro-mergulha...

[3] https://www.cartacapital.com.br/saude/segunda-onda-de-covid-...

[4] https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2021/03/19/tres-novas-cepas-...

[5] https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/2021/03/19/17-estados-e-o...

[6] https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/2021/03/19/em-meio-ao-col...

I am hearing from friends and family in Brasil that the Brasilian variant is more severe among younger victims than the original COVID version. There is an increase of deaths among twenty-year-olds as a result.

All the more reason to stop all strains as soon as possible. If more contagious strains can be knocked below the sustainability threshold then they'll die out too.

It is not possible to stop all strains. SARS-CoV2 has multiple zoonotic reservoirs, transmits easily, and persists in the population via asymptomatic infection.

We have eradicated one human virus in all of history, and it took a highly effective vaccine and a hundred years. The long tail is very long.

Curious, what virus we eradicated?

Smallpox.

Smallpox. Except for some samples in secure laboratories.

Smallpox. I think we're close on polio?

We're getting there but it's super hard to do it in remote areas and conflict regions.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/health/in-pakistan-victory-agains...

Smallpox and Rinderpest.

Polio and Measles are doable, and at this point more logistical and political problems than biological ones.

The “logistical” and “political” problems being that they’re endemic in countries with major political and economic instability, where the locals have a bad tendency to kill the people doing the vaccinations.

It isn’t a trivial problem. And oh yeah: Covid is in those countries now, too.

I never said they were trivial, and have argued exactly the opposite elsewhere. But it remains that they are logistical and political challenges, not biological ones.

It is still important to stop this particular strain and to achieve sufficient vaccination levels to achieve herd immunity.

That immunity will likely be durable for many years (based on the somewhat recent study of HCoV-229E).

That will force the virus to mutate to achieve true escape immunity (a strain, not a variant, which can reinfect everyone all over) which will likely come at a cost to fitness, since one or two mutations to spike isn't enough, and there will need to be a few tens of mutations to spike.

That virus strain will not be as transmissible or virulent as what we are dealing with now, because it has had to make those costly "decisions".

And this is important for people who for medical reasons cannot be vaccinate or who are at high risk even if they are vaccinated. They're much better off being infected by subsequent strains down the road than being infected with version 1.x of this virus.

This is also what has been observed in the past with 1918 H1N1 which later evolved into seasonal influenza.

“That virus strain will not be as transmissible or virulent as what we are dealing with now, because it has had to make those costly "decisions".”

I’m not convinced you can absolutely guarantee these changes will make the virus less dangerous, we could be unlucky and it could become worse.

Right now that is what is happening, but as the title shows those variants don't achieve immune escape.

The sum total of mutations necessary to achieve immune escape and overcome herd immunity is a lot more likely to come at a cost to overall fitness.

Also I can't guarantee that West Ham United won't win the Premier League, but the safe money is all on Man City.

Paper on the possibility of mild disease endemicity:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741

AP coverage of that paper:

https://apnews.com/article/common-cold-india-coronavirus-pan...

I'm not convinced we can get an effective global, rolling vaccination program in place to set up effective population immunity.

From what I can tell, almost all public discussion of the future of Covid is similar to a "happy path."

For all the reasons I cited above, we are not going to “stop this strain”.

Covid is endemic. It is not going away. It doesn’t meet any of the standards set up by the WHO for eradication, and even if it did, it would take decades of intensive work, on par with what we’ve been doing for polio.

The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was also more deadly to younger people.

Various theories have been offered as to why, none of which are proven, including that it may have been observational errors or due to overcrowding conditions due to the war and viral dose.

I wonder if it isn't due to the virus coming under pressure due to a large chunk of the population becoming immune, so evolution favors higher transmissibility. And the easy knob the virus has to increase transmissibility is to increase viral load, which has the side effect of increasing virulence/lethality. That is consistent with that fairly well studied mechanism of parasites/viruses, along with being consistent with what we're observing.

At any rate considerations like that are why I'm not letting my guard down until I'm vaccinated and why it seems stupid to do so.

I dont believe virus ever increase in lethality as pressures increase, I thought the opposite happens, they naturally becomes less lethal to be able to spread more effectively.

Also when you said " stupid to do so" what are you referring to?

thx

Sure, the president is responsible for that too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3osqOIT7SQ ? One thing is poor people arguing to have to work. Other thing is this "funk train".. The video is from yesterday. You can count, like 2 or 3 masks on the train.

Also for selfish reasons. I know a 24 year old ballerina (so a professional athlete) who had it two months ago and is now at 80% lung capacity.

And to pile on this, I know a triathelete in my group, 24 years old, who had it in April of LAST YEAR and is still not at 100% (can't do any hard aerobics without getting wildly out of breath).

We are still in a pandemic. Stay distant.

I have a coworker that never went to the ICU but can no longer taste or smell. Their family was never at a high risk and only felt normally sick. None the less the damage is done. No one wants to be maimed by this. Claiming “I’m not high risk (of death)” does not mean there is no risk of damage.

We all need to do our part to stop the spread of the virus.

We have a friend in their late 30s who also never went to the hospital but got sick with covid five months ago. They have yet to regain their sense of taste or smell.

This kind of thing isn't rare

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

And the even more selfish evolutionary reason: viruses mutate. If we spread it a ton while it's still "safe" for someone young, we're risking major mutations. It's like playing Russian roulette with 8+ billion bullets x probably millions/billions of viruses per person.

We just need one strain to go to something like 5% mortality + mortality across all age groups for this pandemic to become a civilization ending event. Maybe not ending, but "setting back by 20-40-60 years" event.

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