Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

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I see lots of evidence that this is going to be an ongoing situation for the next several years. There are a few likely outcomes depending on the scientific outcome and the country:

1. We could invent a vaccine and discover that COVID mutates slowly enough that we get long term immunity. After mass vaccination in rich countries, the problem is basically solved after 1-2 years and life can go back to what it was in 2019. However, after 2 years of changed consumer habits and a set of companies and supply chains that will naturally adapt to the situation in the interim, the new normal might be significantly different than the old normal. Governments and international trade will have been changed. Investments in automation and telework will have been made. Some changes will be permanent. Like with WW2, 9/11 or the Great Recession, the ripples of causality will spread out for decades.

2. We could realize that the virus mutates fast enough that even with vaccines, we have a new endemic virus, possibly resembling the prevalence of the flu, but much more deadly. COVID will be one of the leading causes of death, up along with heart disease and cancer. People accept this increase in mortality and accept shortened lifespans. After several years of adjusting to the new reality, people start to just live with it. Some common activities completely lose their appeal due to the increased risk, such as theaters, concerts, travel, public transportation, and open offices.

3. We are unable to vaccinate against the virus, but continue aggressive measures to keep it from spreading a much as possible. We accept a new form of digital surveillance state that keeps us the goldilocks amount of isolated. We accept the new reality of algorithms determining our ability to live, work, and socialize. Life is increasingly lived digitally and in VR.

I think it's important to consider these possibilities because of the Normalcy Bias. The best way to overcome it to to seriously consider that tomorrow will not at all be like today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

> Some common activities completely lose their appeal due to the increased risk, such as theaters, concerts, travel, public transportation, and open offices.

I really doubt that. Even with very dangerous disease, like Polio and Measles, most people lived their lives as normal.

Let's take a more recent disease as an example to investigate whether people are likely to make behavior changes due to the possibility of contracting an illness since those diseases you mention have had a vaccine for about 80 years and people do generally get their vaccinations.

The AIDS epidemic peaked in 1995 in the USA at 40k deaths per year. People absolutely made permanent changes to their sex practices as a result of the disease such as safe sex, regular STD testing, and taking preventive medications (PREP). Because of transmission characteristics, the disease spread fastest among gay men and the epidemic created huge cultural changes in gay America. Until PREP was available, the idea of having unsafe sex was extremely looked down upon and seen as an unnecessary risk, even though many men find condoms less pleasurable.

So I'd say that's pretty direct evidence that people are willing to curtail or modify their recreation when it becomes risky.

> The AIDS epidemic peaked in 1995 in the USA at 40k deaths per year. People absolutely made permanent changes to their sex practices as a result of the disease such as safe sex, regular STD testing, and taking preventive medications (PREP).

This is not a good example. Most people in the United States were never in a position to get AIDS because they are not MSMs and not promiscuous. Most sex takes place between spouses.

Gay men still have much higher prevalences of promiscuity and unsafe sex practices than the population at large. Promiscuity and 'unsafe sex' was never an issue in the general population.

Yikes. I hope you will examine your biases and better educate yourself. Here's a starting point:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/82330#3

Your link doesn't say what you imply it does, only that promiscuity is not the ONLY cause. Which is true, anal sex (vs. vaginal) and role switching are also huge factors, as evidenced by the study they reference.

"However, according to two large population surveys, the majority of gay men had similar numbers of unprotected sexual partners annually as straight men and women."

In 2007. Gay male promiscuity has been on a steady decline since the 80s, the time of the last epidemic. Honestly, using 2007 data for the 1980s is like saying that people didn't get sick of cholera from drinking out of toilet water wells because no one does that today.

The vast majority of people are not having anal sex, which is a more common practice among gay men. Anal sex is an incredibly effective way to spread AIDs. I don't understand why this is controversial. Promiscuous anal sex between men is a risk factor to spread AIDs. Promiscuous straight couples typically don't have anal sex.

Moreover, as your study points out, 'switching' who is in what role in anal sex is another effective way of spreading AIDs. Women cannot be the penetrative partners in anal sex, so even if a woman contracts AIDS via anal sex, she cannot spread it as a penetrating partner.

But to directly contradict your false narrative. I'd point out that your study was done in 2007. That's 13 years ago. Gay male sexual behavior in 2007 greatly differed from that during the AIDs epidemic. By choosing to use an article from 2007 to explain away gay sexual behavior during the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s, it is clear that you are trying to spin a narrative instead of actually look at events. In the book "and the band played on" by Shilts, the number of partners recorded during the 80s among the minority of gay men who had AIDS was regularly in the hundreds. This is clearly more than most people -- gay or straight.

Like I said, AIDS is a disease that affected a relatively small amount of people who continued to live life as normal because they could not control themselves. This furthers my point that people are not necessarily willing to sacrifice life's pleasures due to a deadly disease

Uh...there's also option 4. We develop antiviral drugs that work against the virus, so that survival rates improve.

That's true, and would make the outcome more dependent on the quality of the county's healthcare system. Let's say we had an amazing antiviral that made the virus no more dangerous than the common flu. You'd need both testing capacity to rapidly identify who needed the drug, plus a ready supply of the drug so people could get treatment before their condition worsened. Rich countries could get back to a sense of normalcy, perhaps even quickly if the drug were discovered in the next month or two and were easy to manufacture. Poor countries without good healthcare systems would likely struggle and continue to suffer the worse effects of the virus for much longer till they could build up healthcare capacity. Drug discovery is normally a lengthy process and none of our current antivirals seem to be wonder drugs for this virus, so I think this scenario is unlikely.

Not anytime super-soon we won't. Even fast tracked, drugs take a while and often don't pan out. Chloroquine and the one Gilead developed both turned out to be duds. You're engaging in the normalcy bias.

I think in some countries (e.g. Australia, New Zealand) there is a real possibility that COVID may be eradicated within a few weeks/months. That could allow life to mostly go back to normal within the country, provided that severe restrictions are maintained on international travel. Those severe restrictions will do immense damage to industries that depend on international travel such tourism and higher education, and may have to be sustained for a lengthy period (at least a year, possibly several years). That outcome may be much harder to achieve in countries with a larger population and less physical isolation (such as difficult-to-control land borders).

It also leaves those two countries at risk of suddenly having an outbreak which spreads rapidly.

After a few months of being cautious of no major risk People will relax.

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