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Comment by sto_hristo | Hacker News Reader

Such pandemics don't start every other year. Last great one was 100 years ago. So i wouldn't worry at all for the "winners", there's plenty of time for generations to refresh.

Worry about government's inability to learn and improve based on past mistakes, also complacency. It's not hard to imagine 100 years from now, popular presidential guy spearheading the next great pandemic, calming the subjects down with the great medical advancements they had since today and how well prepared they are. Until nature, as it always does, disregards everything and does its own thing unchallenged.

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The vaccine hesitancy will impact vaccines for HPV, measles, HEP B, etc. etc. for generations.

Most people against the COVID EUA vaccines are not anti-vaxx, at all.

> vaccine hesitancy will impact vaccines for HPV, measles, HEP B, etc. etc. for generations

This will be geographically--and, over time, economically--isolated.

Nearly 80% of American adults and over ¾ of eligible Americans have taken at least one dose of a Covid vaccine [1]. In the 65+ population, the figure is 95%. This simply isn't a big group of people, noisy as they may be. (Caveat: the group of people who are philosophically against vaccine mandates, but will get vaccinated anyway, is larger.)

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...

Agreed, I think the effect is that there will be pockets where herd immunity is not reached that will be a source of outbreaks for years to come.

> will be a source of outbreaks for years to come

We have experience containing outbreaks in small, isolated groups of high-risk populations. Even in densely populated places, e.g. measles in Williamsburg. The advantage is you know ex ante where the risk is, versus having the possibility of it popping up at random anywhere in the country.

I wonder, do we expect the rate of pandemics to increase or decrease over time?

On the one hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the human population; more people, more hosts for mutating viruses, greater odds of one mutating to a pandemic-causing disease. There have been roughly 400 billion person-years lived since the last pandemic, but given the larger populations, we'd expect to accumulate another 400 billion person-years by around 2070.

On the other hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the animal populations humans interact with. More animals to breed the viruses, more interactions to pass along the next candidate pandemic. In this case, we might expect more than a century for the next pandemic, since the next century isn't expected to be nearly as kind to animal populations.

(Obviously the situation is more complicated than an either-or, and has many contributing factors, and is stochastic in any case.)

Whether you believe SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab or not, the fact is the technology for engineering pandemic-causing viruses exists and hostile regimes have given no assurances that they won't continue to develop that technology, so we're well beyond any limits imposed by mutation and natural selection.

Tinkering with virus genetics is arguably high school level, garage lab science at this point, advantaged by mass production of almost everything you need, rna editing and crispr methodologies are well beyond published and into the "follow this tutorial to make a glowing frog/beer/bunny"and "here's how to add arbitrary sequences to rna."

It's almost certain that bad actors will make use of the available tech. We'll likely see many synthetic plagues before regulation and international controls catch up.

...are you not counting HIV as a recent major pandemic? SARS? MERS?

It is also worth remembering that for decades we have been carefully monitoring the spread of infectious diseases to prevent major pandemics from forming. There was no political controversy surrounding those efforts prior to COVID19, not in the US or anywhere else.

SARS and MERS never reached pandemic status. Swine flu in 2009 did though, and Avian flu seemed like it was going to in 2012 but also fell short.

None of those have had the global impact of COVID-19, so it think it's pretty easy to not count them as on the same level.

Compared to COVID-19, HIV/AIDS has killed far more people worldwide and has an untreated fatality rate orders of magnitude higher. But it spreads and progresses more slowly so it seems less dramatic.

HIV was discovered in the 80s of a past century. COVID rocked the world since month 1 of its inception and to this day keeps on rocking, despite the radical measures to contain it and the unseen global vaccination campaign.

Major - yes. "Great" - far from it. COVID is basically unstoppable despite the draconian measures lots of countries took. Post SMS if you're going out, yet your hospitals remain overloaded - HIV, SARS, MERS don't even come close to that.

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