Similar to how so many people have been unwilling to even consider a lab leak was a possibility, until just now it seems, because that idea was heresy to the orthodox dogma that ordained Scientists are Saviors.
Humans have equated sickness with Sin for thousands of years, and catching covid has been no exception.
If natural immunity only protects against a particular strain and the vaccine against a group of them I think that’s still a solid reason to continue pushing for people to get vaccinated.
If anything, infection from current circulating virus is more relevantly effective (but obviously more dangerous than the vaccines).
What I wonder is how much post-infection immunity might be from something other than just the spike protein, and therefore a bit more flexible against new variants than our strictly 'detect the spike protein' vaccination programmes.
And how 'flexible' immunity is from infection vs. vaccination.
This notion that natural immunity is “worse” or won’t be able to handle the “variants” is completely contrary to the evidence as well as just basic napkin immunology. It’s, IMO, purely an idea spread implicitly through media headlines with the obvious intent of convincing people who don’t benefit from the vaccine (those who have already recovered successfully from COVID-19) to get it. I’ve talked to multiple friends in real life who had PCR-confirmed COVID/19, recovered, and got the vaccine anyway (which of course had even worse side effects than the usual second shot syndrome since the immune system had already been sensitized to SARS-2), and upon my prodding they basically all seemed to think they needed the vaccine to be protected against “the variants”.
This is not true of Sinovac, which is a "good-old-fashioned" vaccine and provides exposure to the full (dead) virus.
Thus, some of those on the opposite side will interpret strong natural immunity to COVID-19 as a political loss.
Lockdown in left wing countries has been much worse (as in, you can't get out of this area, you need to wear masks outside) than in the UK or the US.
Tbh I was expecting better from the UK Tories and I wish they didn't implement all these restrictions and gave away so much money - but they did way better than other European countries I have friends in. At the same time, I've seen approval for Boris and Rishi Sunak increase among leftists, probably because they enacted pretty left wing policies.
I don't have sufficient expertise on the matter to hold strong positions either way.
https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-...
Thus even when full immunity to reinfection is gone - which btw the estimates I’ve seen are that IgG lasts a few years before the individual is seronegative again - there will still be immunological memory which persists indefinitely and vastly reduces mortality and morbidity.
But we aren’t testing as much, so it’ll be worse for those at risk
I too remember when the concept of "natural immunity to Covid" was a wild, dangerous conspiracy theory, along with the "came out of the Wuhan lab" theory. Funny watching the narrative change in real time.
Let's not rewrite history. It was clear that the media (e.g. BBC, below) chose to amplify messages that discredited natural immunity.
[Prof Wendy Barclay said:] "On the balance of evidence, I would say it would look as if immunity declines away at the same rate as antibodies decline away, and that this is an indication of waning immunity."
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54696873 Oct 2020.
If losing markers is often an indicator of lost immunity then saying the expectation is lost immunity isn't wrong, even if that like ends up being false.
For instance data around infections from recovered and vaccinated people to others is still scarce to my knowledge. While we know that the health benefits for you are there whether it is enough immunity to completely prevent spread is still hard to examine.
The media is not a recognised scientific body.
In Oct 2020, if someone saw https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54696873 and commented, as you just have, "The media is not a recognised scientific body.", what would you have said?
A lot of things have been said in the media about COVID, most of them wrong and few correct.
There is no conspiracy.
Relevant text: For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so. “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.
If you include deaths from related factors, like increased poverty or unrest, I'm sure the numbers go up a bit, but not to tens of millions.
I don't state this as an attack, by the way. Covid and its entangled cultural and political issues are enormously emotionally charged, and, one way or another, that tends to skew our perception of even relatively simple facts.
One thing I think the Hacker News community does well, at least aspirationally, is try to keep sight of the fundamental technical details of issues. For a pandemic, having an accurate intuition of its scale falls into this category IMO.
70% herd immunity without vaccines is 0.7% of your population basically. While I don't think we would lose the 49 million that implies unless we ignored it completely that does make saying we would lose 10s of millions if not for vaccinations not far fetched.
Yes I would put good odds we stay under 10 million in reality. I was only talking about the "natural herd immunity" idea.
The lab leak theory is still not proven. Collected evidence over time points to it being more likely. The "narrative" was there early on, but attacking China as leverage in a trade war surely cemented any desire to hide their own faults. What did we stand to gain by pointing fingers without proof or even a preponderance of evidence? Even now is it likely to lead to reform in virus and gain of function research?
Almost impossible not to give it to others.
Relying on it was pretty reckless, especially given how little we understand it.
Your facts are old, very old.
Transmissibility has been linked to the nasopharyngeal viral load during onset symptoms. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33296437/] The virus may not be as present in your nasal discharge, or breath. We've also known from the start transmissibility is also definitely not linked to the severity of symptoms.
When you read from articles from the CDC such as [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...] they don't mean all people spread it the same way, just "we have found it spreads commonly in these three ways".
Ironically enough, we traced my positive infection to a non-human animal which sneezed in my face. Within a day I had conjunctivitis (pinkeye). I had non-typical symptoms before severe fatigue set in. I just thought I was going through bad caffeine withdrawal at the time.
Locked inside the house with my spouse and kids for two weeks with symptoms, breathing all over each other, laughing in each others faces, touching the same items, etc.
I only got tested on day 13 when the respiratory and heart symptoms set in. 6 months later I still have some lingering issues. Nobody else in the house or who I associated with ever got it, and they tested every 5 days for a month.
Honestly not sure what your point is. Are you saying that for someone who is infected that the probability of not giving it to others around you is not very high?
The gist of what I'm saying is that even if you think that your chances of dying, or even inconvenience, from the virus is extremely low, your ability to control its spread to others is also pretty low. Meaning that you can become a vector to someone who is at high risk. So people going to corona-parties thinking only about the impact on themselves is reckless and selfish.
There's a lot to say about Covid-19. We've learned a lot about it since the start. But objectively, its transmissibility is not what was feared. So the scare tactics about that -today- is wrong.
Covid-19 can be deadly. All people and politicians should have taken it seriously. I don't fault people for being enthusiastic in their political corner, and in the U.S. there were a lot of lines crossed by both sides.
My personal reaction was to be overly cautious. I got it anyway when I started being less strict. And it was nearly as bad as I feared. But I also think governments were wrong to force shutdowns, prevent assembly, etc. It was a misuse, and a spectacle.
High risk people have the option to do what they need to, or to be surrounded by people who advocates for them. (And that right there, I bet, is where you and I will fundamentally disagree). And I respect your disagreement.
Without safe vaccines we'd be having a different conversation. But now is the time to find more answers, spread truth, and be good to one another.
I actually find it a little fascinating that your comment, the first two replies (and mine) all differ tremendously in what we deem important takeaways.
As my doctor puts it "It is definitely a strange bug".
There was a moment where we thought our daughter had the virus. It became quite clear how futile it was to avoid her infecting everyone else in the house. Fortunately for everyone, it was something else.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...
I'm American, but I've lived in Germany for the last 20 years. Here, vaccines are being used as the carrot to be able to get rid of the restrictions (like mask wearing, limiting of contacts, etc.). It feels like everyone wants to get rid of the restrictions here, and it's more of a fight about who gets to do that first and why.
In Germany everything Covid turned political last fall, with Laschet being anti-restrictions and Söder being pro-restrictions. In both cases to score political points for their campaigns to become the conservative's candidate for chancellor.
Everybody wants back a normal life, some people simply have trouble accepting that it will take a while still. And that doing it prematurely poses a significant risk.
And what's the consequence of your pov? That everyone just gets sick and those who make it are all good? What good is public policy if it doesn't protect the public?
“Only bad people don’t wear masks” mentality. Completely separate from if they are still needed or not.
My hope is that all the laws and restrictions will be rolled back as we learn that we can live with Corona.
1. First you make a hypothesis.
2. Then you gather data.
If people arent allowed to make hypotheses or gather data around hypotheses, we can't do the scientific method.
Reinfection is extremely low otherwise it would have shown itself in the data. That’s really a simple fact.
And we see the consequences with old Asian ladies being punched in streets by young white thugs.
I've personally always held it as a possibility. But no way I'll defend the Trump administration on this.
Speaking of hate-mongering..are we seeing the same data on anti-Asian attacks?
I have always accepted the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in China. However, like many other Americans, I refused to be drawn into public speculation about it by people, like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, with a political and ideological interest in stoking xenophobia. In particular, I saw their attempt to blame China--before definitive evidence was acquired--as an attempt to shift blame away for the Trump administration's dismal response to the virus to external actors.
And yes, we have seen a rise in anti-Asian hate crime and sinophobia in America, largely as a result of this kind of rhetoric.