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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

[edit] this is in response to the earlier version of your post where you wonder if the virus will ever go away:

That I think is a given. Even if we had a bullet proof vaccine, you have such a large reserve of unvaccinated people across the world, plus animals, that the virus is endemic at this stage.

Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about.

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I am not a virologist, but based on my reading, in 100 years COVID will still be with us. At worst it will be the flu, and at best it will be just another strain of a cold.

COVID has the very helpful quality of being least impactful on the very young. As new children are born they will be exposed to COVID multiple times over their lives, to the point when they are at ages we now consider vulnerable, they likely will have developed as much resistance as one can have.

"If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless"

Note that even not vaccinated, the ultra large majority of people either are asymptomatic or don't get anything worst than a flu (which doesn't mean covid = flu in general)

We seem to have forgotten that the original concern with the virus was the fact that it saturated intensive care units in hospitals, and thus prevented people from getting proper care.

That’s the original acute concern. Long run we still don’t know if it will have effects on brain function etc. There are some disturbing lines of evidence on this front. For example the UK biobank showing grey matter loss post infection including in mild cases:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...

i remember this study, but i'm surprised we don't have more papers on the same topic since. It seemed like a pretty big news, and yet i don't hear people recommending mass-vaccination mention it.

Any idea why ?

My guess is it takes a while to do this sort of study. UK biobank was unusual in having such a large database of scans.

Vaccination should reduce the risks. But there was a nurses study that 19% of the breakthrough cases had lasting effects. So I would not expect vaccination to eliminate the risk if a breakthrough happens.

I recommend mass vax and this point is one of the main points I use. But I agree with you that sadly, this danger is not well known.

Which, unfortunately, is still relevant - as seen in Louisiana and Florida. A frank and honest admission by one of the physicians on Reddit was that most people who stay in ventilator for weeks have no path to recovery but families don’t let them go. Essentially COVID patients hold up the beds for a long time as well.

In places with high vaccination rates, to some extent, tracking new cases as positive test rates is fighting the last war.

We might also see the first batch of medicines appear in 2022, if we can successfully prevent ICU visits with effective medicines for starters, that would mean a lot to healthcare professionals worldwide.

Is there any actual development here? It's definitely not a given that we can do this.

There actually is!

Two studies in Brazil have shown a pretty significant reduction in hospitalizations in a RCT of fluvoxamine. More data obviously required.

Plus there has been more work on other treatments, but most are pretty expensive.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22619137/fluvoxamine-covi...

While obviously complicated, Pfizer is working on a promising medication and I know of a dutch trial using antibodies that’s starting a next phase.

>Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about.

It's a problem if you're one of the many people who, for whatever reason, can't be safely vaccinated.

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