Thread by @enn_nafnlaus

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO This is wrong in so many ways.

First off, "the flu" is caused by influenzavirus. "Colds" can be caused by a wide range of viruses, a minority of them including coronaviruses, but none involving this branch (sarbecoviruses), which have a very different mode of action.

The...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO reason why it's proven so hard to develop herd immunity to the flu and colds is specifically because they're so incredibly diverse. They've been evolving alongside humans since time immemorial, though new ones periodically transfer in from wild animals and certain random...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO strains prove unable to overcome herd immunity over time and die out. Any vaccine for one strain will only affect that strain.

The general pattern for seasonal influenza and seasonal colds is that herd immunity tends to develop in northern climates in the northern winter...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO for whatever strains were dominant that year, and they die off. This does not even remotely involve everyone catching the disease - usually only a small percentage of the population, but enough that - combined with everyone else's past immunity - it pushes R0 to back...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO below 1.

However, herd immunity tends to break in the opposite hemisphere or in the tropics as this happens, and they find new ground to mutate. Herd immunity breaks due to everyone's immunity slowly weakening over time while the virus slowly develops mutations to bypass...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO it. Eventually R0 is greater than 1 with respect to a given population, and it only needs to be introduced to that population to sweep through.

This is happening not just with a single flu or cold strain, but a whole diverse array of hundreds of different vectors at...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO once. Vs. COVID, which while certainly slowly diverging as all diseases do, does not have one iota of the biological diversity of today's range of cold and flu viruses.

Flu shots target the strains that are expected to be dominant that year, and they help, but have...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO historically been nowhere near as effective as the new mRNA COVID vaccines, only target specific strains, and uptake rates are low. There's much work however going into more "universal" flu and cold vaccines that can target a wider range of viruses, with higher efficacy.

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO I do want to say that I think it's really unfortunate that the name "coronavirus" stuck for 2019-nCoV, rather than a more specific term. Coronaviridae is a whole broad family of viruses and says little about how each one behaves. It's sort of like if a new species of lion...

@SwingTraderCO @garnettca @Mista3rdEye @GovofCO ... moved into you r neighborhood, and the local press referred to it as the "cat outbreak", because they're in the same family as cats. Referring to it as a "lion outbreak" would give a far more accurate impression. 2019-nCoV should have been referred to as a *sarbecovirus*.