Will We Ever Get Rid of Covid-19?
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Even better.
The combination of today's fast advancing technical knowledge, paired with the deadliness and globalness of Covid, relationships to HIV in terms of amplified risk, and the common cold and flu, has triggered a highly funded and increasingly organized war, waged with new weapons increasingly generalizable across viruses.
This war started with an unusual bang of many "small" battles won surprisingly quickly, which will maintain commitment and momentum needed for the war. Which given the world's inequalities will not be short.
Like the world entering the Holocene, our immune systems are entering into the era of routinely engineered support. Watchful preparedness, with engineering and distribution systems for resistance, mitigation and cures.
Eventually we will get to routine rapid detection, isolation and extinction. Perhaps even going so far as to eliminate threatening viruses in wildlife. Although that is far off.
Will we reach a point where SARS-CoV-2, and its various mutations, are no longer a significant public health concern and we can return to "life as usual"... yes.
SARS-CoV-2 will probably mutate over time to become less virulent but more transmissible. Vaccines and immune system adaptation will allow most of us to not worry about COVID too much until our later years in life, much like the flu. COVID will continue to cause some deaths, but at a much lower level which is generally acceptable, as is the case with the flu.
We're only seeing 'this many' Covid variants, because right now it has so many hosts to work with. Whether through vaccination or infection, that will change over time however.
We already have 4 other Corona Viril endemic in the human population. They probably all started out super deadly in a pandemic. This one will be endemic soon, too (1-2 years I assume).
But, "no", we will never get rid of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus).
Unfortunately the idea that Covid becomes just another common cold virus can be no more than wishful thinking at this point.
Without vaccines and public health interventions, likely SARS-COV-2 would continue washing through the population, with waning immunity and variants causing endless sickness and death, much as smallpox, polio, measles etc used to before we got a handle on them.
It is not wishful thinking that in the future, child exposure and adult immunity will be the norm. Covid is already just another common cold for the young.
Covid infection fatality rate for children is on the order of 1/100,000, similar to influenza or varicella (chicken pox), but much more dangerous for the elderly without immunity (like influenza or varicella).
This is drastically different than something like smallpox, which had a 30% fatality rate.
> Covid infection fatality rate for children is on the order of 1/100,000, similar to influenza or varicella (chicken pox)
Aren't flu and chicken pox an order of magnitude or two (or three?) more deadly than the common cold in children?
If you look it up, you can let me know.
> Covid is already just another common cold for the young.
The Pediatric mortality Influenza, covid, and chicken pox are all about the same order of magnitude as each other. diseases like smallpox are perhaps 5 orders of magnitude more deadly.
Furthermore, we don't know what if any protection childhood infection would give later in life - certainly reinfection in adults is common, with no guarantee that symptoms are less severe.
To take any approach that allows the widespread circulation of Covid is reckless at best at this moment, particularly when we do have the tools available to us to control it (mandatory vaccination and targeted lockdowns).
This is exactly what the numbers support. both diseases have deaths on the order of 1/100,000 inflections for young children.
>Furthermore, we don't know what if any protection childhood infection would give later in life - certainly reinfection in adults is common, with no guarantee that symptoms are less severe.
All of the covid data we have suggests that infection symptoms are less severe if people have immunity from vaccine or prior illness.
>To take any approach that allows the widespread circulation of Covid is reckless at best at this moment, particularly when we do have the tools available to us to control it (mandatory vaccination and targeted lockdowns).
Vaccines and lockdowns can help control the spread, but will never be enough to prevent it from being endemic. Vaccinated individuals can spread the disease and it is in animal populations around the world.
Please also provide sources for subsequent reinfection (as opposed to vaccination) being less severe.
Lockdowns have certainly worked in China (20% of the world's population), so it is possible, if we choose it.
(to my knowledge, no significant outbreak has occurred from spillback)
Depends on how you define "have worked". If you optimize for just variable (COVID infections), then yes, they have worked. Until now.
If you look at the entire system, they have failed miserably.
Kill peoples animals after forcing them out of their home. The list goes on. They still hide the origin and any information to this day and politically attack any country that pushes to open any investigation into it.
I agree that it is hard to find IFR/CFR for the common cold. You can use total influenza death to get a sense for a lower bound.
This paper[1] puts total H1N1 Mortality at 6/100,00ok per year for <18 year olds and CFR at ~20/100,000K
This paper[2] puts the total population mortality for flu at ~0.15/100K for <18 year olds
this paper [3] also puts CFR for flu like symptoms in single digits x/100K for <18 year olds.
>Please also provide sources for subsequent reinfection (as opposed to vaccination) being less severe.
There are many sources available for this one. This Israeli analysis [4] of 2.5 million individuals found that breakthrough infections were 7.13-fold higher in Vaccinated individuals than covid recovered individuals. Hospitalizations were 6.7-fold higher in vaccinated individuals than recovered.
Of course it is better to get vaccinated than get covid the first time, but this demonstrates that natural infection immunity is very robust.
>Lockdowns have certainly worked in China (20% of the world's population), so it is possible, if we choose it.
Lockdowns and vaccination have helped control covid in china. They have not eradicated covid in China. This supports my point that covid will be endemic.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361... 2: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/141/4/e20172... 3: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1586/ers.10.24?casa_t... 4: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
Does the Israeli study control for age?
Given that China has perhaps a few 10s of cases currently, amongst 1.5B, I think eradication is accurate to a first approximation.
Covid is equivalent to the common endemic flus for the young*
>Does the Israeli study control for age?
It does
>Given that China has perhaps a few 10s of cases currently, amongst 1.5B, I think eradication is accurate to a first approximation.
Eradication does not mean "in control".
They 4 other CoV have been studied extensively and there are also theories about their origins. You are taking very different types of virii and compare them with a Corona Virus, which makes no sense at all.
The question you need to answer: Why should this CoV be so different than the 4 others we know?
Btw: Common colds can be very deadly if your immune system is weak or not familiar with them. Just go and ask some native Americans back in the 1640s.
As for the common cold and native Americans, you will need to ask them yourself - my understanding is that the common cold viruses have always been globally widespread. Please correct me if I'm wrong!
Here is just one paper around that topic: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34273512/
Later the history books will mention covid as the catalyst for world transformation and it won't say a peep about the money that was made, because it doesn't matter.
Smallpox used to be endemic, Polio used to be endemic, measles used to be endemic. That is not where we want to end up at.
How do we stop this? The same way we did with the others - comprehensive vaccination, mandated if necessary. Lockdowns on any outbreaks.
Covid will most likely evolve into a more transmissible, less lethal variant as time goes on.