When spell-checkers came out, it was a godsend for me. If I left my spelling mistakes in my writing, you wouldn't be able to make out half of what I was saying, it's so bad.
A lot times I can't find the words in the dictionary because I can't spell it close enough to find it. I use Google a lot now because they have AI/phonetics algorhtms.
(I left that last word misspelled, just so you could see how I tried to spell it unassisted so you get a feel what I face with this issue. It's a real pain.)
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@Pat Actually the idea that more lethal viruses are less of a thread isnt actually true. For example if a virus kills 100% of victims but takes 30 days to do it it will still spread quite a bit if it is contagious enough.
I debated this some months back and if you look at a comparison between R0 and morality they arent really strongly correlated at all.
>...if a virus kills 100%, social distancing might actually be followed more tightly, lessening the spread
Yes, human behavior is a big part of it. With diseases like ebola with all of the bleeding, or small pox with the facial deformities, those diseases probably spread less than they would otherwise because people take them more seriously.
Long before we even had a vaccine I mentioned that vaccines would fail no matter how many people were on board, and surprise surprise, it played out almost exactly the way I claimed.
There is a reason we have never had a successful vaccine to any coronavirus class virus in existance. Every vaccine we tried never made it to market due to the exact sorts of problems we are seeing
@freemo Have you considered the need for boosters in your equation, though? Long covid and risk of needing hospitalization so far seems to have decreased hugely with the vaccine.
The current ones needing hospitalization despite being vaccinated are the ones who got vaccinated the first in the timeline, and also very usually are either elderly or have more ailments than just this virus. They're highly due for boosters now.
That's the same situation in Israel. I remember us chatting about this, and the Israelians (is this a word? Well, it is now.) were among the first to get vaccinated. Not too surprising that about 6 months later there was another surge.
Vaccinations aren't 100% effective, but we already agreed on that. Boosters would be a likely necessity, but we already knew of that. That's why the current talk is now 'BOOSTERS!'. We'll see how that pan out, I think they might help.
When i explained my concerns in the past I did go into detail on boosters. What I had said at the time is that for a vaccine to have any potential of working it would need boosters that would likely need to be very frequent, on the order of every 3 months to 6 months, which is not practical as a long term solution and overtime presents ever increasing risk since the nature of mutation of corona class viruses are not like flu viruses. A flu virus undergoes recombination and thus its next gen viruses are not any more deadly or specialized, they just make the vaccine less effective. Corona class viruses as they mutate to stay ahead of vaccines undergo a more classical form of mutation and as such create an ever increasing risk as you vaccinate against it, presuming you even find a booster every 6 months to be palatable at all.
@freemo Yeah, as this is still largely untested fields for this virus you certainly do have a point. Though there are more factors at play, of course.
I see boosters as a way to buy time at the moment until we have a more permanent solution. Even without boosters the virus would mutate anyway.
Also, boosters can still go two ways at this point. Either you would need regular boosters, or the third (or maybe fourth) booster would be the end solution. Some vaccinations for other ailments needed a 3rd booster much later as well. But seeing as we haven't got much long-term experience yet with this virus it is still largely guess-work at this time.
For boosters to buy us time at all we would need to engineer a new RNA sequence every 3 - 6 months. Usually vaccine testing takes longer than this so the only way boosters will really be effective (most likely) is if we throw the usual safety testing out the window.
That said also keep in mind that while boosters may buy us some time it means every new booster that targets the new strain will likely give rise to a newer even worse strain. So you may find going that path doesnt buy us time at all but pushes the virus evolution to the point where the problem becomes even harder to solve and in the end make matters much much worse (potentially)
While you are right the virus mutates regardless of boosters, and that the vaccine doesnt **cause** the mutation what the vaccine does do is it causes new mutations to be **selected for**. This means that without a vaccine new mutations will come, be very low prevelance (well below 0.1%) and then die off as they cant compete against the pathway of the original virus. The vaccine however gets rid of the base virus and thus allows the new strain to become selected for at which point you will see its prevalence skyrocket nearly over night from <0.1% to 99%, the exact opposite of dying off. This is exactly what happened with Delta.
The other thing about boosters is two fold 1) as with all coronaviruses immunity tends to be temporary (anywhere from weeks to a few years) so you need a booster that is the same as the original every few months 2) coronaviruses mutate fairly quickly so you also get new strains arising. Meaning you need to double-dose, one booster every few months for the old strain AND new boosters you have to start repeating for new strains.
Point is, if you go down the vaccination route it becomes unmanageable very quickly.
@freemo That's a very valid point, but no vaccination at all isn't really much of an option either if the healthcare gets overworked and other treatments (cancer, heart trouble, etc) gets cancelled just because of Covid. Unless we get to decide that everybody who's infected just stays at home, and just will die at home as well if they can't handle the virus.
We're in quite a pickle, aren't we?
Doing nothing isnt an option, but the choices arent vaccination or nothing.
If it were up to me my focus would be on supportive medicine. Forget about masks, or vaccines, or any of that. Instead invest all that money on 1) researching cures such as transcription inhibitors that may provide a solution where vaccines wont 2) dump tons of money into building new respirators and space in hospitals so we can handle the increased load on the medical system until we find a solution.
@freemo Oh yes, I wasn't saying vaccination or nothing, sorry if I gave that impression. I'm more like saying, vaccinations buy us time so your 1) can get to work.
The 2), however, is totally not an option here, alas. In the years we have this pandemic, our healthcare didn't really improve much despite the huge need. Hospitals even got closed... which is actually quite ridiculous. It's all about money and 'efficiency' somehow, and yet our healthcare workers are still overworked.
But even Germany with its huge IC capacity (they have proportionally really a lot of IC) is now refusing to take over our patients, as they're facing a huge surge themselves as well. Whoopsie.
What im hearing is not that #2 isnt an option there, its that politicians are idiots and didnt execute on #2... big difference.
And yea improving ICU capacity is a huge cost. Expecting other countries to be able to support their own increased capacity AND yours isnt going to work. The netherlands needs to execute on #2 rather than bickering about what to do :)
Thats fair. But that mostly just boils down tot he fact that your government cant stop quibbling... Lets not pretend the solution is impossible. Politics just refuses to do what it needs to.
I blame a lot of it on the medical community which is trying so hard to get everyone to conform they sell everything as absolute fact when the truth is we are kinda just making educated guesses of minimal info. The end result is that when new data questions the earlier assumptions they refuse to back peddle.
We are so committed to vaccines being the solution right now that it would be career suicide for a medical worker to actually suggest we let the virus run its course and focus on supportive care. The narrative has been repeated too many times to backpeddle now for fear of loosing public trust.
@freemo Well, to be fair the vaccines are still a decent short term solution (short term for the reasons you've given already). As we're having a HUGE surge right now, that could've been avoided by vaccination (short term), I can see why the healthcare workers won't backpeddle at this point in time as they're the ones who have to deal with this shit firsthand.
Granted, it could've been more avoided much more if the government didn't do a dum-dum and say all restrictions are lifted about a month (or two) ago.
We totally saw this coming, even though they claim we didn't.. uhuh.
@freemo Yeah, that's where we might differ in opinion. I see it as a valid strategy but it needs to be utilized properly. What's proper is uh... well, that's what we'll have to figure out somehow. We're humans, so chances are we're all idiots anyway. So far most of humanity are doing their best to prove this theory right. ;)
That said, if I got offered a booster shot, I likely won't refuse. I'm all for buying time and I'm fervently hoping that with the time bought there are good investments made into solutions that might actually work.
But we still have the 'humanity is stupid' as fallback, so maybe nothing works at all. :P
To give you some perspective the first vaccine caused the virus to shift from its original form to the delta variant. This is approximately 3x to 4x more contagious than the original virus.
The more contagious a virus is the more people need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity.
Which means if we keep using the same vaccination approach as a "temporary" measure, with continually creating new variants of vaccine to combat each new virus, then you will get ever increasing R0 numbers (how contagious it is).
By the time we have a solution that might work the thing will be so damn contagious that the herd immunity threshold will be too high to reasonably reach and despite the vaccine being effective we will no longer be able to fight the virus anyway.
Its like the antibiotic problem but instead of evolving over the course of decades it evolves over the course of months. I'm not sure you realize just how devestating going the vaccine route will be as long as it only remains a temporary option.
@freemo Just as an aside, I wanted to hook up on your first paragraph solely. You said the delta variant is a result from the vaccine, but isn't it originated in India and were they not woefully undervaccinated in that country at that time? I had the impression that variant has developed without the need of selection bias due to the vaccine.
@trinsec
It doesnt take much vaccination for a variant to take hold. Consider the data. India began vaccinating in january of this year. Likewise delta variant began to be detected in very small prevelance in january as well. As the vacination rate of india grew so did the delta variant. By the time vaccination rate reached 20% then the delta variant finally became the dominant variant crossing the 50% threshold. As of today about 50% of india is vaccinated and delta variant is now pretty much the only strain in the wild with high 90's percentage range of prevelance.
So yea vaccination in india directly correlated and strongly correlated with the delta variant spreading.
@Pat