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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Calling Covid a "novel" virus was a mistake. Technically it's true but that didn't mean we needed to toss out everything we learned about viruses and start from first principles. Even from way back in March of 2020 even the most basic things we knew about viruses felt controversial. People were seriously thinking you could catch and transmit covid after like 3 months or something--like you'd just constantly get re-infected over and over again. And people flipping out about outdoor transmission... like when has catching a virus outside ever been a real thing? Everything we knew about the subject had to be re-proven.

It was and still is completely crazy.

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Some of the problems with our response is actually based on the opposite issue, our first response impulses were to treat it like a novel flu strain. So we re-ran the H1N1 playbook. The flu was believed to be mostly spread by droplets/surface contact and not airborne, so they assumed covid was too.

The issues you are describing is more the problem that health officials shift the burden of proof depending which assumptions or policies they want to make. Any facts that counter their policies have to be proven by significant evidence. And they often wouldn't look too hard. A fact that supports their conclusion can be assumed until proven otherwise.

Calling Covid a "novel" virus was a mistake

It was called a novel virus to indicate that no person already had (acquired) immunity against it. What inference you make from the word "novel" is on you, not on the rest of the world.

That remains unclear. Some research indicates that exposure to other coronaviruses might have given some people a limited degree of acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2021.07.015

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.103831

Many people got Delta and then Omicron even 1 month later. Kai Ryssdal from NPR for example, and one of my friends did too.

So this isn't crazy; it literally happens to many respiratory viruses. Viruses mutate

Yup. But like you said many respiratory viruses do that. Does that make the flu virus many of us catch every year novel? How about the common cold? Is each specific virus also novel?

Why did we decide to throw out everything we knew about viruses for SARS-CoV-2? It's like society discovered "OMG I could catch a virus and die!". Not realizing that virtually nothing was new about SARS-CoV-2. It's just a respiratory virus like any other we've had passed through millions of generations of living beings. Oddly enough the "broader human species" managed to survive and thrive through all of them.

I always wondered how people claim that. Did they have two pcr tests or something else telling them what variant they had?

I had delta in late October and omicron in early December. I was PCR positive for delta, although I had a mild case. I wasn't allowed to take a PCR test for the December infection, because it was too soon after my delta test and my symptoms were very mild. I did test positive multiple times on LFT, my symptoms matched the 'ultramild' omicron (scratchy throat, slight cough, lower back pain). The day I tested positive for omicron was 4 days after my friends had gathered in a pub, of the 30 of us in attendance 27 tested positive on the same day. The group chat was wild. Some of those that got PCR's were informed they had omicron.

Most PCR tests will discriminate between (B.1) Omicron and things which are not B.1 Omicron, so it's feasible to know this. I mean, strictly speaking all you'd know is that you had B.1 Omicron plus something else, but if you had the non-B.1 Omicron one in October, then in most parts of the world you'd be pretty safe in assuming that was Delta.

> Calling Covid a "novel" virus was a mistake.

I don't remember anyone ever doing that. I remember them calling it a novel coronavirus, because it is a new coronavirus, at least to us.

We didn't have to toss out everything we learned about viruses and start from first principles, but certainly people's irritation with COVID restrictions seems to have provoked people to ignore decades of research to the contrary to make bizarre assertions like you can't catch viruses outside or get reinfected (ironically the early scientific and mainstream speculation about if COVID would be different was mostly taking the optimistic tack that COVID might be less likely to cause reinfection than respiratory viruses endemic in the human population like flu...)

Same goes for the T-cell immunity really: it was pretty much a given that the body's normal immune processes still applied to coronavirus, but what was novel was the unscientific community insisting that they couldn't possibly be reinfected and a course of vaccines couldn't possibly give them any benefit to their immune system after they'd been infected (someone should tell all the old people who get flu shots every year!)

> someone should tell all the old people who get flu shots every year

What we call the flu is not a single virus that comes once a year. It's different types of virusses each time, and the flu vaccine targets the most likely candidates of that year. So no, you don't generally get REinfected with the flu, because it's a different virus. Some of the virusses that we consider 'the flu' are actually corona virusses, and perhaps covid19 will join that list as it becomes endemic.

No one who is familiar with viruses considers other human coronaviruses to be "the flu". They aren't even in the same phylum! All influenza viruses are Negarnaviricota whereas all coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2 are Pisuviricota.

There are four other endemic human coronaviruses which typically cause common cold symptoms. Those symptoms are clinically distinct from the flu in most cases.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(20)30862-9

What we call the flu also includes a wide variety of viral illnesses better known as the common cold, which includes some coronaviruses - the flu shots offer no protection against most of these different viruses

What medical practitioners call the flu is a small subset of influenza viruses common in humans, each with a high potential for reinfection, including reinfections within a year (as well as constantly evolving variant strains, just like COVID)

'novel' is a perfectly cromulent term for covid-19. what's not cromulent is the unreasonable and extraneous reaction to a 'new' cold virus. every new virus will have outsized effect until we settle into steady-state (which depends on the dynamics of the virus).

what leadership needed to do was identify the dynamic threat--mainly to the elderly & immune deficient--and mitigate for them, not run around screaming like discombobulated chickens promoting throw-everything-against-the-wall safetyism. we could have had highly targeted mitigations and minimal disruption to our lives; instead, we got incessant debates over useless masking, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates.

even including the elderly and immune deficient, over 99% of people get covid and recover just fine. this isn't the black plague by any stretch of the imagination.

> every new virus will have outsized effect until we settle into steady-state

No, this one killed more people than anything in US history, more than wars, prior pan-/epidemics, etc. In my lifetime, no 'new virus' has had any sort of similar effect at all, by orders of magnitude.

the flu kills ~36K/year, so if you're ~22+ year old american, then the influenza virus has killed more people in your lifetime than covid.

we don't know yet what steady-state looks like, but note that medical/epidemiological organizations don't generally keep death statistics on colds (caused by rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, etc.) because they're not a significant number. colds can be a contributing factor in death for folks with deficient immune systems, just as it is with covid, but is generally not the sole cause.

again, >99% survive covid just fine. for people with multiple co-morbidities, it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).

> >99% survive covid just fine

That's not a good survival rate, though the number sounds big.

> it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).

The people at risk are not nearly all "teetering on the brink", nor have they died at this astounding rate from other causes. We could save their lives.

People are dying; and we can save them, and we could have saved many more. Blood is on the hands of the those who stood in the way.

99+% is a big number no matter how you try to slice it. people on the brink should assess and mitigate their own risk, with reliable, honest information and help where needed, not paternalistic overreach. people are dying, full stop, every single day, day in and day out. why weren't you so concerned about the millions who have been dying all along? why weren't you sounding the alarm like this about the flu that has killed more people in your lifetime than covid (which likely always will be the case)? let go of the mediopolitical propaganda and move on.

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