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Comment by glouwbug | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but what about when it gets cold again? It may come back even worse

By then, we should have enough testing kits, and authorities should be better prepared to handle it.

Not to mention a better baseline immunity within the population, and more preparedness as a whole.

Testing kit shortages, lack of information, no vaccine, etc. are all a function of how little time we've had to respond. If we can buy 3 months, that's a lot of bonus time to prepare.

Europe had about 3 months compared to China and is handling the situation much worse.

I think this thing is so contagious that all the weak people will already be dead.

The second wave might kill a few of the survivors that had their immune system weakened since the first wave, but it shouldn't be as much people as the first time.

Surely surviving the first wave will be a plus against a second wave as you already have some immunization?

IF this is the case, we should be way more prepared including possibly having a vaccine available.

Still no vaccine for SARS 18 years later, what makes you think we'll have a vaccine for this?

SARS hasn't been seen in 15 years. Exactly whom did you expect would spend the time and money to develop a vaccine for it?

Maybe we should develop responses to pathogens that have the ability to wipe humanity off the galaxy.

Given how close SARS and SARS-CoV-2 is, maybe the SARS vaccine could be applied to the current case.

I think that's likely, but it's understandably difficult to convince anyone to spend a few hundred million dollars to develop vaccine that might never be used.

Seems like a pretty good deal right now. Our economic system has structural pathologies that make it extremely difficult to meaningfully organize whole populations.

Yeah, ok, I think I agree with this. I have to believe that a sustained effort to develop coronavirus vaccines would bear fruit, whether actual vaccines or merely processes and knowledge, even if the particular motivating disease was no longer in circulation.

> Maybe we should develop responses to pathogens that have the ability to wipe humanity off the galaxy.

Not a bad idea, but isn't that a near-infinite set?

It can and will. For that matter, it's an RNA virus that is morphing as a function of the error factor of replication, so vaccines may be ineffective (for the same reason we continue to get the "common cold" again and again over our lives, as well as the flu -- the signature keeps changing).

We will see.

Though it's worth noting that there are a lot of very contrary signals on whether it attenuates with heat. Some find that it doesn't, while some do. The very origin of this -- Wuhan -- had very temperate conditions when the outbreak began, and transmission seems to be much worse in the US than in Canada.

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