Hacker News Reader

Comment by daanlo | Hacker News Reader

My layman understanding is that it doesn‘t work that way. Less spread = less chance of mutation = less chance of uber infectious new flu strain.

View on HN

It's potentially the opposite. Say you have a population of 1000. If one person infects ten others. Then its going to be 3 generations before 1000 are infected and full immunity is reached.

We go for a suppression strategy instead.If 1 person infects 1 other person (as we seem to be trying to achieve with corna) it is going to take 1000 generations before full immunity is achieved. There is going to be far more chance of mutations in 1000 generations of viral replication than in 3 generations.

That is a really interesting thought. But isn‘t the chance of mutation per viral replication (which happens million-fold in each human per infection) and not per human? What I meant was that if we contain the virus to only ever get 1% of the population sick then there is a lower chance of mutation than if it gets 70% sick.

If everybody has had the disease, what's the purpose of having full immunity?

However, I think this is right in one sense: an implicit or explicit strategy of keeping R0 as close as possible to 1 would be the strategy with the highest risk of significant mutations, as we have seen.

UK government ministers literally stated this to be their strategy.

It was just an example to make the theory easier to understand.

Your second paragraph assumes that a suppressed virus will not go extinct. If the suppression is effective, with eg. vaccines it can be done with quickly, with no higher chance of mutations.

> If the suppression is effective

Comparing places that didn't lock down to those that did I think its fair to say that the strategy has not been effective.

Where people weren’t constantly battling the decisions, lockdowns were quite effective. The problem is that without a very strict but short lockdown you will get into this semi-lockdown that is hardly effective and thus just prolongs everything. But the answer never is “just do whatever you want”.

No they weren't we have had close to a year of them here in Spain, and the first few months were ridiculously strict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com