Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, this. COVID-19 is topical now, so we're looking hard, here.

I'd say more than 1 million confirmed deaths and over 81 million confirmed cases (in the US) in two years is more than just topical. We are approaching half a billion cases globally with over 6 million deaths.

Yes, there have been lots of Corona viruses in the past, some of which result in things as ubiquitous as the common cold.

It's called a novel Corona virus for a reason: humans had essentially zero immunity to this virus and its ability to evade the body's defenses and mutate so quickly at this scale is something we haven't seen before. Each major variant is more transmissible and more elusive than the previous one. BA.2 is now the dominant strain and the FDA just authorized another booster [2]. In many ways, we are still coming to grips with what we're dealing with.

We don't have a choice but to continue to look hard at COVID-19--the results of allowing it spread so widely are right in our faces and we have to deal with it.

[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[2]: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...

I sense that we may me talking past one another. You seem to be focusing on my word choice and and justifying that we should spend resources studying COVID-19. My post does not dispute this at all.

What I'm saying is that to conclude that effect X (demyelination) is a cause for additional concern with respect to disease A (COVID-19), we should go back and see whether effect X is also present with respect to other diseases such as B, C, D (common cold, flu, etc). Because we may have found X linked to A because we are looking so hard at A, and not have found it previously with respect to B, C, D because we weren't looking as hard then.

Humans had a high level of immunity to COVID-19 before it even appeared. Many patients clear the infection entirely with the innate immune system, and suffer few or no symptoms. It's just like any other respiratory virus in that respect. Our species never would have survived so long if that wasn't the case.

The best evidence indicates we have seen something like this before, specifically in the 1889 pandemic. That was most likely caused by the HCoV-OC43 coronavirus (genetically very similar to SARS-CoV-2), although at this point we probably won't be able to prove the cause 100%.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Additional boosters may be beneficial for some patients with defective immune systems. But they're not advised for the general population. We can't boost our way out of the pandemic.

https://youtu.be/jAjKQY0_BQA

Topical may imply temporary, which may have struck a chord with you, but this brings a genuine curiosity to the burning question, what are the conditions if any for returning to normal? I chuckle as I write this as living in western Canada, we just recently got the public place mask mandate removed so it's back to "normal" for some people even more, except we are dealing with record high inflation across the board (lumber too) -- c'est la vie...

Like, there have been mini-pandemics in the past (Spanish Flu is one I read a bit about), how do we "win" against it instead of just "minimize damage"? Herd immunity? Given headlines like OP, it makes one pause to think.

SARS-CoV-2 is sufficiently contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect those who lack immunity. Everyone will be exposed. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments are fairly effective at preventing deaths.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

The mask mandates implemented in most of North America were never an effective public health intervention. Areas which never had mandates, or removed them sooner, had similar outcomes. Correlations with death rates were weak at best, and confounded by multiple other factors.

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