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Comment by tamaharbor | Hacker News Reader

Like the common cold or the flu, odds are the coronavirus will be with us forever in some form or another. It is unrealistic to create a vaccine for every variant. We should learn how to treat, and allow natural immunity to take over. Take the 0.07% (correction) chance of death.

Edit: Stupid math error.

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The case => death rate is much higher worldwide (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality). Even if you assume that every human on the face of the planet has had COVID and the death counts are perfectly accurate you arrive at a rate of 5.5M dead / 7.8B cases = 0.07%, ten times the rate you stated. But of course not every human has contracted COVID, largely thanks to people taking preventative measures like social distancing, mask wearing and vaccination. The path you suggest would likely lead to the preventable death of many million more people.

> The path you suggest would likely lead to the preventable death of many million more people.

people who suggest that we should "let natural immunity work" are implicitly imagining that they themselves are going to be OK, and would rather have their freedom and activities restored at the cost of lives. Other people dying is "a sacrifice i'm willing to make".

It's very reasonable to give people yearly updated shots. There are big overlaps in the variants so we wouldn't need one for each variant, not to mention you could combine multiple variants in one shot.

Also, your case mortality rate number seems wrong, by orders of magnitude.

Isn't updating the vaccine on a yearly basis something that's already being done for the flu vaccines?

> because flu viruses are constantly changing, the composition of flu vaccines is reviewed annually, and vaccines are updated to protect against the viruses that research indicates will be most common during the upcoming flu season.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/keyfacts.htm

> 0.007% chance of death

Not sure if you're being hyperbolic, but the death toll just in the US has surpassed 0.23%

Sorry, misplaced decimal point…

World covid deaths = 5.7 million

World population = 7.9 billion

Death toll = 0.07%, rounded up

Not everyone in the world has had COVID, so you’re using the wrong denominator.

Also add to that discrepancies between excess deaths and covid death numbers in places like India, which appears to have a difference of about 7-10x the official covid death count

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-ind...

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