Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy
wsj.com
wsj.com
Meanwhile Israel, which vaccinated its citizens at impressive speed, has already ordered booster shots for the over-60's and is considering another lockdown.
Unless the spread of the virus is curtailed, there will be a steady stream of new variants that the current vaccines do not protect against. Right now, we are putting pressure on the virus to become more virulent. If we don't squash the virus the chicken and pork lines at Tyson will stop with every new variant and the economic damage from the continuous waves of disruptions will be greater than that from any effort to stomp out the disease now.
> SARS-CoV-2 is also carried by animals, which some hypothesize can spread the disease to humans. We will need to rid ourselves of dogs, cats, mink, bats and more to get to zero.
Which means the headline is correct.
Was there something in the article you thought was incorrect?
It's like with Hepatitis C and Medicare. We have very efficaceous drugs and could eradicate the disease if we wanted to but we don't budget enough. Instead, we let it spread and evolve resistance and run up costs in the indefinite future for no other reason than a lack of political will. The more we treat it now the less it'll cost us later.
The institutions staffed by our grandparents generation delivered this, just as they delivered the Hoover Dam and Apollo 11. Contemporary western institutions are incompetent as the bungled COVID response has demonstrated. Even if we wanted to "come down on COVID" we couldn't, the golden era has passed.
There was a story on NPR couple days ago(?) talking about the challenge of getting shots in arms in some of these third world places - and how we've delivered many shots that may expire because the infrastructure to get them where they need to go is not a thing.. sure you can blame gen xyz in the west but in situations like that if I was going to point to incompetent it wouldn't be on the west side.
The covid response imho is more about desire/motivation - there is a large group of motivated noisy folks sure, but there are many people / groups who are not very motivated to vaccine with a survival rate of 99% or whatever number is accepted / wont get me labeled as an anti-vax grandma killing disinfo person.
I am not a doctor or claiming this is accurate, and sure it's 'out of context - the suffering is more than death' all that - I'm just pointing out that the motivation is low and one of the reasons why.
surely the large groups of you-must-vax-panic people could deliver a dozen hoover dams today, and I'm sure they'll all be on board for more apollos.
"Even if we wanted to "come down on COVID" we couldn't," - I agree generally wit this part.. but not because a golden era has passed - it's because the larger group of folks around would rather stay open / not locked down and keep on keeping on.. (which does keep an economy rolling for future appollos - haha - (speaking lightly / not a mean or whatever voice!).)
(not taking a political side with this btw, just counter-pointing the golden era is with the old people and today's mass of western power is not incompetent - although certainly we are more diverse in our reasoning for not getting some things done - new hoover dams would be hard to build more because of environmental worries, ethnic justice impacts and the like, not because we are less smart, or less willing to spent future generations money)
unless you are inferring that today's insinuations are incompetent because they are held back by environmental and similar concerns that our grandparents did not worry about, but that's not the feel I got from reading that blurb.
hep c - sure we could budget more and that may wipe out much more.. we could also take the drug from the patent holders and sell it for $10 instead of $10,000 or whatever it is. Instead we do let it spread, I agree.
Just adding a couple more options to changing the way we've been doing thing.
Whereas covid is very infectious, can spread by air, no good treatments exists and vaccines are good but does not fully prevent infection and spreading. How else do you propose to eradicate it?
The only virus we ever eradicated was smallpox, and only because that didn't have an animal reserve.
Covid will keep jumping between animals and humans. There are at least a dozen different mammals that harbor the virus. It can't be eradicated from humans while this is true. I have never seen any scientific authority talking about eradication as being a possibility.
Do you assume that we will kill all these animals all over the world to try to eradicate covid?
This is a good economic talking point. Is there a reference for your claim, or did you make it up?
Even if you exclude the epidemiologic downstream effects Hep C eradication treatment is likely cost-effective: https://www.ajmc.com/view/cost-effectiveness-of-total-state-...
Israel doesn't need another lockdown. They just need to accept that cases will not go to zero. Vaccines help greatly reducing deaths and severe disease. Booster shots might help even further but obviously will not make it zero either. Just learn to live with it.
Even a global crash effort expending far more money than we're likely to, would take many years. It took about 60 years to eradicate (almost) polio by vaccine. Even optimistic scenarios suggest for the near and medium term future, there will be large concentrations people who aren't vaccinated in various regions, sustaining the virus's wild spread.
It has not eradicated it wholesale, just help reduce it significantly in built-up areas, and the kind of animals likely to interact with humans and livestock. If a bat flies into your bedroom and bites you, you still need a rabies shot. I sometimes find the vaccine "treats" littered around when I go on my hikes. I suppose if I ate one I'd develop some rabies immunity, but I don't think they're approved for use in humans. LOL.
An edible adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccine for animals (or humans) is almost certainly possible, technologically. It's probably nearly hopeless to expect to eradicate it that way, admittedly. But I thought you might find such wild animal vaccination programs interesting if you didn't know of them already. It's done in a variety of places for a few different diseases.
But I'm not sure that has the policy implications they think it does. No one in the US (or outside of Australia/NZ/parts of Asia) have really been _trying_ to eradicate Covid.
But at some point, we will have to figure out what the goal is of our Covid policies.
At first (Spring 2020) the goal was to "flatten the curve" i.e. prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. We largely did that.
Next, the goal was to postpone as many infections as possible until vaccines were widely available. They are.
So the question is: what comes next? Perpetual restrictions and lockdowns every time there is a flare-up to try and prevent as many (mostly unvaccinated) deaths and hospitalizations as possible? Or do we just accept that everyone is going to get it eventually and we've done all we can to minimize the risk (to people who choose vaccination)?