The main concern I'm hearing right now: What if new COVID variants keep evolving so much that vaccines can't keep up and we end up in a situation like the flu?
It's possible, but I think it's unlikely. Here's why:
The flu has 2 advantages: 1. Other animals can be reservoirs, so even if you stop it in humans it could go back from them,
Do you remember avian flu? Swine flu? Animals that carry the flu include ducks, chickens, pigs, whales, horses, birds.. cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/v…
Meanwhile, so far COVID has only been witnessed to easily jump between humans and minks AFAIK. There's not much data on this yet, but it's very hopeful
2. The flu mutates much more quickly than COVID
It took 50M cases (and probably hundreds of millions of infections) for COVID to mutate in 3 bad variants. It's much slower.
With the current vaccines + herd immunity, the speed of mutation will slow down: fewer cases, fewer opportunities for mutations.
Meanwhile, vaccines are amazing. It took 1 year to approve the Moderna vaccine, but only 2 days to create it. The rest of the year was testing and approval because this was a new technology.
Moderna likely already has vaccines for the new variants. And now that the tech and vaccine are proven, it's likely that they can test them and get approved in a few weeks rather than many months. Once tested, they can create a vaccine that covers all variants at once.
At the same time, Moderna and others are ramping up production and are making deals to share production with other cos. With + production capacity, they can probably ramp up production and distribution much more quickly too, sending it to the world quickly
Slower mutation rate, higher vaccination rate, and few external reservoirs means I think we can eradicate it
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1. 60% higher transmission rate 2. 30% higher fatality rate 3. 35% more vaccines will be needed 4. The herd immunity threshold goes from 60% to ~75% 5. A few more months before everybody is faccinated 6. ~60% stronger containment measures are needed to stop it
Vaccines won't arrive in time to stop it. So we need to prepare for another wave.
Instead, the effect will be really felt this summer: between immunity through infections, through vaccines, and outdoors activity, the pandemic will die down btw June and September
I introduce the "Scary Virus Paradox":
"After clearing a threshold, the less deadly a virus is, the more it will kill."
(Deadliness here defined as R0 * IFR)
(log-log graph)
This is obviously caused by society's reaction: the deadlier a virus, the scarier, and the more society acts in unison against it, like for Ebola or SARS.
Nobody cares (cared?) about the flu, so it kills ~350k ppl a year.
Measles antivaxxers, covidiots, antimaskers and the like are therefore a predictable reaction to a virus' deadliness.
1. Disrespectful and polarizing
He calls us "lockdowners" as if he was trying to demean us. That does not sound like a productive way to have a fact-driven conversation (which he claims to support).
2. His understanding of what he criticizes is shallow.
I'm not a "lockdowner". I hate lockdowns. They have a very specific use in some cases, but Western countries have used them nilly-willy. Their failure was to not use the right tools (fences, test-trace-isolate..)
What countries turned around their strategy?
Several. My favorite is Singapore:
It failed with its Fences and its test-trace-isolate programs in dormitories, but updated them and was able to control the virus