Frankly, I'm far more worried about the current cases, given the death rate of people who are on the older end. For most healthy middle aged/young people it's basically a cold from what I gather.
The numbers vary massively but I have seen a number of about 20% hospitalized cases. This includes the elderly and people with preconditions. But still, you would not want to develop any pneumonia when your local hospital is running over its capacity.
It's a given that American hospitals will be running out of ventilators, beds, and nurses will be stretched too thin. And if you need an ECMO and/or organ transplant in the near future, good luck with that.
Unsurprisingly, smoking seems to be a huge risk factor [1]: “[..] the multivariate logistic analysis indicated that age (OR, 8.546; 95% CI: 1.62844.864; P = 0.011), history of smoking (OR, 14.285; 95% CI: 1.57725.000; P = 0.018), maximum body temperature at admission (OR, 8.999; 95% CI: 1.03678.147, P = 0.046), respiratory failure (OR, 8.772, 95% CI: 1.94240.000; P =0.016), albumin (OR, 7.353, 95% CI: 1.09850.000; P =0.003) and C-reactive protein (OR, 10.53; 95% CI:
1.22434.701, P = 0.028) were risk factor for disease progression [Table 4].”
Here's a chart made from a study in China. It's actually a bit unclear, but I'm assuming it's 18.5% of confirmed cases that require hospitalization. Now, the question is how many of those that got sick at all got confirmed in China, and how many people presented symptoms (those are unknown).
So it seems like it's less than 18.5%. On top of this, Chinese men are heavy smokers and the air quality in China is pretty terrible, so that may play a part as well.
It's definitely worse than a cold, the symptoms of a cold are very mild, for me it's usually painful swallowing, runny nose and slight and short-term increase in temperature and tiredness.
> Common signs of infection include respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure and even death.
The problem is that some people forget that between "common signs" and "severe cases" there's a vast area of very uncomfortable symptoms until you get to the severe cases, and we're currently still learning about this very gray area.
I believe I have it although I haven't been tested yet. I'm a healthy and physically active 28 year old. I have a high fever, general body aches, difficulty swallowing, dry painful cough. This is the third day of symptoms with no improvement. No pressure or tightness in my chest as of yet.
However, if I have it, my wife probably has it too. Her only symptoms are a mild sore throat and an ache in her back. It's much less severe than mine.
I had the bad luck of getting swine flu in 2009 and this is just as bad.
I think I absolutely misrepresented what I think. I didn't mean for it to come off that it wasn't more serious than a normal cold. I meant that many won't be affect more than that,. However the ones that get more sever cases/more exposure are at high risk, not to mention the older populace in general. I'm absolutely terrified for everyone right now.
It's not just live or die you know. Reduced quality of life is a possible out come too:
>Similar to patients with SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, some patients with 2019-nCoV develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with characteristic pulmonary ground glass changes on imaging. In most moribund patients, 2019-nCoV infection is also associated with a cytokine storm, ... in those who survive intensive care, these aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.
Yep. Both SARS viruses can damage the lungs. And short of lung transplantation and likely a lifetime of anti-rejection medications, lost lung function doesn't return.
No, this is worse than a cold. Worse than the flu as well.
For 18 to 49, the death rate for flu last year was 1.8 per 100,000 people. Corona virus's death rate is unknown but even among 20 somethings they are talking about an estimated .2% death rate. That's 200 per 100,000 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
Further, that assumes that the healthcare system can perform heroic efforts. In cases where the system is overloaded, such as seen in Italy, mortality numbers can get much worse. Now add that some/many patients have lung scarring that can hold with them for life.
With all of the information available demonstrating that it clearly is pretty serious, I've come to identify people downplaying it as essentially the exercising of wishful thinking: If I tell everyone it's nothing, maybe it will be.
I hope it's nothing. At the same time I understand the responses that have occurred.
That's a bit alarmist. Based on the numbers from Wuhan, where the disease has progressed furthest and the numbers are most clear, it's about 5 times worse than a seasonal flu. There is considerable uncertainty at this stage, of course, but the lower numbers look more realistic. Source: https://www.economist.com/international/2020/03/12/fatality-...
Most children can be host without suffering it and transmit it to other people.
For middle age people, if you are unlucky and get other virus at the same time(because you met with lots of people in a place), like the flu, it can be extremely dangerous.
Last year I catched two virus at the same time and it was so painful. My body reacted too strong with an autoimmune reaction, attacking my own body, my joints, my muscles.
It took me two months to properly recover, and I live a very healthy lifestyle. I sleep and eat well and exercise. The doctor told me that someone in the same situation that smokes for example could develop lots of complications.
It would likely go in parallel, that's why the paper is published on the preprint server. Paper reviews in major journals like Nature can easily take over a year but that is mostly to get the scientific "bragging rights" these days. It has little effect on further research and drug development since the information is out there already.
The part that is most relevant for the development of a new drug/treatment is the safety and efficiency testing in the clinical studies - and that alone will take many months. It can be shortened if it is a drug that has been used before for something else (e.g. that chloroquine for malaria) and is only repurposed because there we know the drug is safe already. For a completely new drug it could take a year or more just to do the testing and get the approvals.
So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time soon.
You can't "do studies on them after". These aren't studies for the sake of publishing papers but to determine whether or not the drug is safe to use and whether it is actually effective.
If the drug or vaccine you are developing ends up killing more people than saving it is not much of a cure, is it?
The same if the drug isn't effective - in that case it would be wasting critical resources and probably causing the sick to not get a really effective treatment.
That said, this process will be certainly sped up to maximum amount possible, given the situation, but it will still take a long time.
Antibodies are special type of proteins that can connect to viruses. It basically marks the virus so that immune system can shoot it down. Please let me know if this is not correct.
I don't know of anywhere that provides a comprehensive list of things COVID-19 isn't. Could you provide a source that suggests that there is one?
Everything I've seen so far (eg, [0]) points to the virus itself damaging respiratory tissue, and normal body immune response aggravating that locally to some extent.
A cytokine storm [1] is, as I understand it, a massive systemic immune overreaction causing way too much inflammation, overwhelming the body all at once.
That Wikipedia entry suggests that SARS may have caused a cytokine storm, at least in some patients, but from it and everything I understand about the phenomenon, it's recognizable in epidemiology largely by the greatly increased incidence of deaths among young, healthy patients—which is not at all what we see in COVID-19.
For those who speak no dutch (neither do I), from what I understand the title gives the most important point.
The google translation also seems pretty good:
Am Dutch, can confirm the article is reasonably summed up with the title. From the article:
Some scientists still had these antibodies from previous research, and so far it looks promising. It has not been tried on humans yet, which can take months.
There’s a reasonable chance this might eventually become the medicine.
I imagine not everyone feels comfortable potentially killing someone with a creation of theirs that they're not confident in, even if others are willing to risk it.
It's the other way around though: it's not them or their creation that is killing the patient, it's the virus. There's a big difference between their creation being unable to save the patient and actively killing them.
That's the thing with giving people stuff that hasn't been tested on anyone before: It might actively kill them, not just not prevent them from being killed by the virus.
It isn't a choice of aye or nay to one drug; there are a suite of drugs that either should or probably do help with COVID-19. If they are going to pick something randomly, chloroquine is probably a better choice based on Chinese trials.
The speed with which things that help against this coronavirus are being found really is impressive. It is good to be facing this in the modern era instead of 50 years ago.
If going experimental, Camostat and E-64d are better choices to blockade ACE2 and TMPRSS2. Chloroquine has much more serious potential side-effects including irreversible, rapid macular degeneration where someone might reasonably prefer not to continue living because of them.
Side note: this translation by Google Translate is amazing. I am a native Dutch speaker and the translation is 100% correct. I had no idea Google Translate was this good.
I wouldn't be surprised if high-volume translations weren't hand-tweaked by a human to iron out mistranslations. In fact, I would be very surprised if Google didn't had a human in the loop to handle these usecases. They already rely on end-users to fix translation issues on their own.
Nope, I doubt that this translation is somehow more tweaked than other translations: Last year around this time I was shopping to import a dutch car. As a German native speaker I find dutch to be pretty well readable with some practice, but I sometimes double checked on Google Translate - and the translation were always excellent. (But reading Durch as a German is actually quite funny, so I prefered that).
However, the user-supplied fixes have probably been a huge contributing factor to getting the translations where they're today. And Googlers reviewing some translations for their training data sets ;)
The structure of English and Dutch sentences is often very similar. There is a glaring error right in the title though: “ Scientists Rotterdam and Utrecht claim discovery...”
Being an English speaker living in The Netherlands, I rely heavily on Google Translate. Works near perfect for formal/semi-formal writing. Short form sentences & phrases (as you might find in casual emails), not so much.
> Or because biotech companies charge what insurance companies will bear for them?
Do you actually have any evidence that substantiates your claim? Wild speculations and conspiracy theories should not have a place in discussions regarding serious matters.
Asking for evidence that supports a hefty claim was never, at any point in time or space, dishonesty. It's in fact the basis for the scientific method, and the basis for laws against libel and slander.
Throwing personal attacks like yours, however, particularly while intentionally turning a blind eye to the lack of substance or support of a few claims based on a conspiracy theory, speaks volumes about you.
Without a conspiracy, what keeps any drug company from selling cheap generic insulin in the United States?
The reason I ask is that I really don't think so many companies can cooperate on price-fixing so I am looking for any other alternative explanation besides an illegal price-fixing conspiracy which I think would be very difficult to pull off among so many players and laws making it illegal.
But the comment you replied to isn't like that and doesn't require a conspiracy.
See Humira [1]. Costs more than 5x more in the US than the UK. I’m not speculating on what a potential anti covid drug will cost; I’m talking about existing mAb therapies. And I didn’t think it a controversial point that drug companies charge as much as they can while their therapies are still protected by patents and, in the case of antibodies, manufacturing expertise.
Monolocal antibodies require a complex and expensive process of cell cloning there are only a handful of labs capable of producing these and non of these can scale up production to anything close that is needed for a large scale epidemic not to mention a world wide pandemic.
This is still cutting edge biotech used for experimental treatment for cancer and other diseases often getting an orphan drug or other exemption certification to go on the market.
You also will be hard pressed to find insurance companies to cover these atm.
The parent comment mentioned existing therapies. As in drugs like Humira, PD-1 inhibitors, PCSK9 inhibitors. No doubt they are complex to produce. But I was doubting that the costs of production are the reason why these drugs are expensive. Companies will charge what payers will pay. See Humira [1]: many times more costly in the US than in the UK.
A vaccine dose proactively creates memory cells (memory B cells) in the body, which allow the body to IMMEDIATELY create fighter cells (plasma cells) when the body is infected with the actual virus, thus stopping it in its tracks. Without vaccine, when virus infects, the body takes times to learn the virus and create the memory cells and fighter cells, and hence the infection gets worse.
The weapons the fighter cells use are antibodies. In this case, the discovery has directly produced antibodies, which are helpful in fighting the virus (but cannot be used to proactively create memory cells). Antibodies have the advantage that they don't trigger the body's immune system, which means less issues to deal with.
Hope this (and other efforts being done) pass testing and get in the field as soon as possible.
Sounds like it. This is not a vaccination. It may be possible that while these antibodies are working the body might also “learn” the virus, thus providing immunity, but that would be a side effect of the infection.
For other coronaviruses that infect humans there the adaptive immune response isn't particularly strong and doesn't last. E.g. immunity to HCoV-OC43 lasts no more than about 12 months.
This is a reason to suspect that a vaccine may not be easily developed; so antibody therapy (and/or anti-virals) might be the best we can do.
If the antibody therapy was highly effective and could be produced at scale for a tolerable cost, it would probably be a pretty effective tool. Though monoclonal antibodies aren't known for being particularly affordable.
It's likely. The body will be less likely to have undergone the immune response to generate antibodies of its own. Additionally, as the immune response develops, the antibody affinity to its target is refined through a process called "affinity maturation", so any antibodies which are produced might not have high affinity and hence result in a weaker immune response.
Treatment with antibodies might be useful as an immediate fix, but vaccination or infection and the development of a proper immune response is the long term requirement for resistance.
'Erasmus MC and Utrecht University find antibody against corona'
A group of ten scientists from the Erasmus Medical Center and Utrecht University say they have found an antibody against the coronavirus, reports Erasmus Magazine.
"To our knowledge, this is the very first antibody that we know blocks the infection and there is a good chance that it will also become a drug on the market," said Professor of Cell Biology Frank Grosveld. It has yet to be tested on humans, which takes months.
The publication about the find is at the discretion of colleagues, after which it may be published in the leading trade journal Nature. "Prevention is better than cure, of course," says Grosveld. "A real solution is therefore a vaccine, others are working on that. However, developing a vaccine takes two years."
Let's say we discovered a cure. For simplicity's sake, this is a hypothetical vaccine that instantly destroys the infection.
How long would it take for such a product to go from the lab to application in the general population?--what are the key variables that factor into such an estimate? Is there some expedited process in the case of a pandemic?
This depends whether it is a "cure", that is a medicine to be given to the people who are sick, or a vaccine, which is given to the general (healthy) population.
For a medicine, a lot of the red tape can be cut, as you might test it on otherwise hopeless cases. There is a limited risk associated (that one person might die) and the results in the case it works are also easy to monitor.
With vaccines, things become complicated.
- vaccines are given to healthy population, and to large parts of the population. So they need to be extremely safe, or you end up killing more than the disease would have had. This is obviously not acceptable and extensive safety testing needs to be done.
- you need to find out, whether the vaccine works at all. Creating a working vaccine against a virus like corona is very tricky - we don't for example have a working vaccine against the cold. So making sure the vaccine has the intended effect takes a long time, especially, if you consider that all tests have to be done with healthy people.
So currently some antiviral medicine is being tested at sick people and some results could be out soon, but for a vaccine, mid-2021 are the most optimistic timelines I heard.
This is encouraging, but the key would be pushing this to clinical trials ASAP.
Efforts need to be made to drastically trim the time-span it takes for a successfully trialed COVID-19 vaccine to get from laboratories to hospitals and into patient's veins.
I'm sure many countries and billion-dollar companies are at it, but making it affordable to people who need it the most is a challenge in itself.
Of course antibodies exist against the virus - otherwise the fatality rate would be 100%. You don't just survive an infection, your body creates antibodies, and they stay in your body for a very very long time. That's the whole point of vaccination.
Once this blows over I'll go get my blood tested for antibodies for the virus - will be interesting to know if I had it.
Note that this is a Dutch news channel, and the article is in Dutch.
Usually, when they report on a discovery done by Dutch researchers, it is considered newsworthy because the researchers are Dutch, not because the research itself is particularly noteworthy. So in addition to the usual reservations that one should have when noteworthy discoveries make the news, there's an extra reason not to hold your breath until you see this appear in international publications as well.
> Usually, when they report on a discovery done by Dutch researchers, it is considered newsworthy because the researchers are Dutch, not because the research itself is particularly noteworthy.
That is just a generic search query. I checked the top 10 search results (in two browsers). These were all internationally reported one, even specifically on HN, or they're only locally relevant (such as who in NL won the Spinoza award). Please link some specific examples.
Sorry, it's just an observation I've made over time, and I didn't save every example I came across. If you want to see it for yourself, keep it in mind when you come across news about Dutch researchers in Dutch news in the future.
95 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadIf it passesthe review stage it will probably be published in the scientific Journal Nature.
Note: this is not a vaccine. Its a treatment option for people who are already sick.
Good shot of ending up in the ICU.
1.22434.701, P = 0.028) were risk factor for disease progression [Table 4].”
[1] https://journals.lww.com/cmj/Abstract/publishahead/Analysis_...
Here's a chart made from a study in China. It's actually a bit unclear, but I'm assuming it's 18.5% of confirmed cases that require hospitalization. Now, the question is how many of those that got sick at all got confirmed in China, and how many people presented symptoms (those are unknown).
So it seems like it's less than 18.5%. On top of this, Chinese men are heavy smokers and the air quality in China is pretty terrible, so that may play a part as well.
> Common signs of infection include respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure and even death.
The problem is that some people forget that between "common signs" and "severe cases" there's a vast area of very uncomfortable symptoms until you get to the severe cases, and we're currently still learning about this very gray area.
Just yesterday the following link was posted on Hacker News: "Coronavirus: Some recovered patients may have reduced lung function", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22568100
[0] https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus
However, if I have it, my wife probably has it too. Her only symptoms are a mild sore throat and an ache in her back. It's much less severe than mine.
I had the bad luck of getting swine flu in 2009 and this is just as bad.
>Similar to patients with SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, some patients with 2019-nCoV develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with characteristic pulmonary ground glass changes on imaging. In most moribund patients, 2019-nCoV infection is also associated with a cytokine storm, ... in those who survive intensive care, these aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
With all of the information available demonstrating that it clearly is pretty serious, I've come to identify people downplaying it as essentially the exercising of wishful thinking: If I tell everyone it's nothing, maybe it will be.
I hope it's nothing. At the same time I understand the responses that have occurred.
For middle age people, if you are unlucky and get other virus at the same time(because you met with lots of people in a place), like the flu, it can be extremely dangerous.
Last year I catched two virus at the same time and it was so painful. My body reacted too strong with an autoimmune reaction, attacking my own body, my joints, my muscles.
It took me two months to properly recover, and I live a very healthy lifestyle. I sleep and eat well and exercise. The doctor told me that someone in the same situation that smokes for example could develop lots of complications.
The part that is most relevant for the development of a new drug/treatment is the safety and efficiency testing in the clinical studies - and that alone will take many months. It can be shortened if it is a drug that has been used before for something else (e.g. that chloroquine for malaria) and is only repurposed because there we know the drug is safe already. For a completely new drug it could take a year or more just to do the testing and get the approvals.
So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time soon.
> So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time soon.
I don't know, I mean, this is one of those things where compassionate use seems likely? Won't we end up trying that and doing studies on them after?
If the drug or vaccine you are developing ends up killing more people than saving it is not much of a cure, is it?
The same if the drug isn't effective - in that case it would be wasting critical resources and probably causing the sick to not get a really effective treatment.
That said, this process will be certainly sped up to maximum amount possible, given the situation, but it will still take a long time.
Biologics like this are new enough that we don’t really know the time courses but in a normal situation it’s still multiple years.
> This is the first known antibody that blocks the infections
> The antibodies have to be tested in humans, which can take months
> The research still has to be peer reviewed
> It stops the virus from further internal infections, allowing the patient to recover
> They are trying to get a pharmaceutical company to mass-produce it
> A vaccine would be a real solution, others are working on it. Vaccine development can take 2 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody#Function
That's why the deaths are almost entirely the very old and immunocompromised.
is it bacterial infection post virus harm then ?
Could you provide a source?
Everything I've seen so far (eg, [0]) points to the virus itself damaging respiratory tissue, and normal body immune response aggravating that locally to some extent.
A cytokine storm [1] is, as I understand it, a massive systemic immune overreaction causing way too much inflammation, overwhelming the body all at once.
That Wikipedia entry suggests that SARS may have caused a cytokine storm, at least in some patients, but from it and everything I understand about the phenomenon, it's recognizable in epidemiology largely by the greatly increased incidence of deaths among young, healthy patients—which is not at all what we see in COVID-19.
[0] https://www.uticaod.com/zz/news/20200313/what-does-coronavir...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Some scientists still had these antibodies from previous research, and so far it looks promising. It has not been tried on humans yet, which can take months.
There’s a reasonable chance this might eventually become the medicine.
I imagine not everyone feels comfortable potentially killing someone with a creation of theirs that they're not confident in, even if others are willing to risk it.
The speed with which things that help against this coronavirus are being found really is impressive. It is good to be facing this in the modern era instead of 50 years ago.
e.g. if dying from the immune response or a co-infection.
However, the user-supplied fixes have probably been a huge contributing factor to getting the translations where they're today. And Googlers reviewing some translations for their training data sets ;)
I believe it was French to Dutch. The result was basically perfect.
[1] https://www.deepl.com/translator
Do you actually have any evidence that substantiates your claim? Wild speculations and conspiracy theories should not have a place in discussions regarding serious matters.
And the comment is quite literally a theory on how someone is conspiring.
Asking for evidence that supports a hefty claim was never, at any point in time or space, dishonesty. It's in fact the basis for the scientific method, and the basis for laws against libel and slander.
Throwing personal attacks like yours, however, particularly while intentionally turning a blind eye to the lack of substance or support of a few claims based on a conspiracy theory, speaks volumes about you.
Since you're so critical of conspiracies, though, I'd (genuinely) love your take on something that does require a conspiracy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/cost-insurance-di...
(For me the Google amp link brought up the full article.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opin...
).
Without a conspiracy, what keeps any drug company from selling cheap generic insulin in the United States?
The reason I ask is that I really don't think so many companies can cooperate on price-fixing so I am looking for any other alternative explanation besides an illegal price-fixing conspiracy which I think would be very difficult to pull off among so many players and laws making it illegal.
But the comment you replied to isn't like that and doesn't require a conspiracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspira...
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/business/worldbusiness/12...
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/igamisugaya_1...
That’s just a few, and just the ones they caught. It’s very hard to prosecute this case, and the incentive to collude is huge.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalimumab
This is still cutting edge biotech used for experimental treatment for cancer and other diseases often getting an orphan drug or other exemption certification to go on the market.
You also will be hard pressed to find insurance companies to cover these atm.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalimumab
The weapons the fighter cells use are antibodies. In this case, the discovery has directly produced antibodies, which are helpful in fighting the virus (but cannot be used to proactively create memory cells). Antibodies have the advantage that they don't trigger the body's immune system, which means less issues to deal with.
Hope this (and other efforts being done) pass testing and get in the field as soon as possible.
This is a reason to suspect that a vaccine may not be easily developed; so antibody therapy (and/or anti-virals) might be the best we can do.
If the antibody therapy was highly effective and could be produced at scale for a tolerable cost, it would probably be a pretty effective tool. Though monoclonal antibodies aren't known for being particularly affordable.
Treatment with antibodies might be useful as an immediate fix, but vaccination or infection and the development of a proper immune response is the long term requirement for resistance.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1....
A commentor posted English translation:
'Erasmus MC and Utrecht University find antibody against corona'
A group of ten scientists from the Erasmus Medical Center and Utrecht University say they have found an antibody against the coronavirus, reports Erasmus Magazine.
"To our knowledge, this is the very first antibody that we know blocks the infection and there is a good chance that it will also become a drug on the market," said Professor of Cell Biology Frank Grosveld. It has yet to be tested on humans, which takes months.
The publication about the find is at the discretion of colleagues, after which it may be published in the leading trade journal Nature. "Prevention is better than cure, of course," says Grosveld. "A real solution is therefore a vaccine, others are working on that. However, developing a vaccine takes two years."
How long would it take for such a product to go from the lab to application in the general population?--what are the key variables that factor into such an estimate? Is there some expedited process in the case of a pandemic?
For a medicine, a lot of the red tape can be cut, as you might test it on otherwise hopeless cases. There is a limited risk associated (that one person might die) and the results in the case it works are also easy to monitor.
With vaccines, things become complicated. - vaccines are given to healthy population, and to large parts of the population. So they need to be extremely safe, or you end up killing more than the disease would have had. This is obviously not acceptable and extensive safety testing needs to be done.
- you need to find out, whether the vaccine works at all. Creating a working vaccine against a virus like corona is very tricky - we don't for example have a working vaccine against the cold. So making sure the vaccine has the intended effect takes a long time, especially, if you consider that all tests have to be done with healthy people.
So currently some antiviral medicine is being tested at sick people and some results could be out soon, but for a vaccine, mid-2021 are the most optimistic timelines I heard.
Efforts need to be made to drastically trim the time-span it takes for a successfully trialed COVID-19 vaccine to get from laboratories to hospitals and into patient's veins.
I'm sure many countries and billion-dollar companies are at it, but making it affordable to people who need it the most is a challenge in itself.
Of course antibodies exist against the virus - otherwise the fatality rate would be 100%. You don't just survive an infection, your body creates antibodies, and they stay in your body for a very very long time. That's the whole point of vaccination.
Once this blows over I'll go get my blood tested for antibodies for the virus - will be interesting to know if I had it.
That was the starting point of the research project.
Then, after some work, the team actually managed to identify one, and one that also neutralizes the virus.
Usually, when they report on a discovery done by Dutch researchers, it is considered newsworthy because the researchers are Dutch, not because the research itself is particularly noteworthy. So in addition to the usual reservations that one should have when noteworthy discoveries make the news, there's an extra reason not to hold your breath until you see this appear in international publications as well.
"Usually"? Do you have examples?