Still, it would be a lot of people: 50 to 83% [1], and more importantly, it has to be evenly distributed. It would be pointless to have developed countries safe while the rest of the world is in chaos. We're a global economy after all.
This is false immunity is strong and long-lasting otherwise they wouldn't be sinking billions into a vaccine which operates the same way that infectious immunity operates.
Herd immunity is a thing, but as I heard one scientist describe it: It's not a question of achieving herd immunity or not, it's a question of how. Mass vaccination also leads to herd immunity, it's achieved by creating immunity in individuals through a vaccine instead of by contracting the virus naturally.
Why would we need that? I think a lot of people will get immunity the natural way, even now a lot of people are having covid w/o any symptoms at all, and they will have immunity.
This is false, immunity is strong and long-lasting. The news is trying to sell papers. A vaccine is also an attenuated version of the virus so if becoming immune from the virus doesn't last long it won't last long from a vaccine.
> A vaccine is also an attenuated version of the virus so if becoming immune from the virus doesn't last long it won't last long from a vaccine.
A vaccine can be an attenuated virus, or a piece of mRNA or DNA, or a distinctive viral protein. Which type of vaccine you use+the adjuvants that go with it can result in very different immune responses and efficacy over time.
> This is false, immunity is strong and long-lasting.
Immunity to COVID-19 varies a lot person to person and is poorly understood. It does however appear that many people can be reinfected (especially people who had mild symptoms the first time.)
The only reason people are testing positive again after having Covid and healing from it is because the test is very poor at distinguishing between various coronaviruses, the vast majority of which are harmless and sometimes cause the common cold. There is a big false positive rate as a result.
News medical.dot net. That's not a legit site. Was hoping for a PubMed article.
I looked at the sources for that article you posted and not one of them supported your claim. Not one. I even went several articles in because news medical dot net was using itself as a source.
There's no consensus at all, even remotely. I have no idea where you got that other than fear based news reporting.
I'm not going explain immunology to you but 99.9999% of viruses on the planet build long-term immunity if you survive. Coronavirus is the same way.
To put it another way..vaccine immunity operates the same way as infectious immunity.... do you think they are going to invest billions of dollars into a vaccine if immunity only lasts for a few months?
I am also not sure how long it lasts but I fail to see why it will matter whether you got the immunity from a vaccine or the normal way.
And let's say everybody get vaccine in 2 weeks period of time, if the immunity doesn't last at least few years what's the point of this mass vaccination then.
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It will stop the spread and die out if everyone gets a vaccination in short period. The virus can't survive outside a host very long so if everyone is immune even for a short period it has no one to spread to. It can be done country by country. Then only people that get the vaccination are allowed inside a country that is immune.
That is very unlikely to happen, if only because vaccines do not have anywhere close to 100% success rate and many people won't be vaccinated due to health reasons alone. Plus there will be animal reservoirs.
Nothing has this kind of success rates. Vaccine, if effective, reduces risk of vulnerable groups and transmission from their caretakers. Exactly like flu vaccination.
Heck, we have failed to eradicate polio in all countries, a level 1 virus much easier to control. I predict zero chance we can eradicate a level 2 virus right now.
Because getting infected still carries a significant risk of illness, permanent health problems, or death with it, especially for at-risk groups. Getting vaccinated would sidestep that risk.
And even if everybody did recover, there's the economic cost of an infection. Productivity missed because workers are sick at home, or worse in a hospital being cared for.
I'm not sure what the dollar figures are, but I would not be surprised if vaccinating a large population turns out to be significantly cheaper than having a small percentage of that large population in ICUs for weeks on end.
FWIW, correctly or incorrectly, I just read the OP as saying that people who have already been infected might not need to be vaccinated because they already have been exposed. So that figure might be smaller than what the BBC is floating. Not saying that affects the challenge appreciably, just that I read it differently.
It is not evident yet that a large proportion of the population will be immune. The virus has some similarities with the common cold and it is well known that immunity does not last for the common cold.
Having COVID without symptoms (asymptomatic) does not mean that you are immune and you are still infectious.
Edit:
> even now a lot of people are having covid w/o any symptoms at all
The last estimate I saw (last week I think) for Stockholm was that only roughly ten percent of the local population had COVID,
Uhm, about 6-20 very common ones,, though total count is close to 200. And these have variants. But even within just betacoronavirus 1 OH49 (10% of colds or thereabouts) immunity is not persistent.
It is just mild enough. There's another one alphacoronavirus in about 5% of colds that is much worse. (Not counting SARS group.) Mind you parallel infection with multiple viruses is common.
The original herd immunity "estimates" of 60% were 1-1/Ro. This never considered heterogeneous spread and it assumed everyone was equally susceptible.
It's hard to estimate prevalance because PCR testing has a large false negative rate. It depends highly on which day of the infection you're tested and even then the peak rate is still quite miserable for trying to find it.
Serorevalence is also tricky as we trade off false positive for false negative and the antibodies decline after a few months. That's not to say that memory B cells can't spin up production on demand though. Then there's the whole t-cell response which may play a bigger role in asymptomatic cases. All in all, its understood that antibody testing is underestimating infection rates.
Regardless of what values we think herd immunity should have, it's pretty clear that places like Sweden have seen the death peak and then tail off without any major change in distancing policies. If anything, people are relaxing more with time.
edit: I should mention that since march, we do have better treatment options and we have stepped up our game protecting care homes all over the world including Sweden which saw a majority of deaths from those facilities. This is why it's important to look at trends in other countries as well.
Generally if this virus is anything like other coronaviruses, it will adapt. And this flare up regularly even if immunity is present. That's how it made the interspecies jumps after all.
So at best it will be a perpetual game of cat and mouse, like it is with flu, but with higher stakes.
Let's assume this virus will be endemic. Why would we assume that the second infection would be any worse than the first? Our immune system is highly adaptive and generally does very well. In fact, we've now got good evidence that there is cross-protection from antibodies and t-cells from other coronaviruses in circulation.
Because best case 0.1% death rate times best case 50% required for herd immunity times 7.8 billion people is 3.9 million dead people. And that's pretty bad.
Herd immunity is only going to be around 10 to 20% because of previous cross-reactivity with common cold viruses.
Sweden Italy and New Zealand have already hit herd immunity. They're done with the virus and didn't have 50 percent.
And before you post that they have a few cases recently... understand herd immunity doesn't mean the virus is gone...it just means the virus has nowhere to jump to... so there will always be a smattering of cases.
I think you misread an article. I saw one mention that 20% decline the infection rate. That's entirely different than herd immunity. I don't see any article saying that the mentioned countries have hit herd immunity. Especially New Zealand seems questionable, they've gone to a full lockdown, not for herd immunity.
And there's plenty of us that understand that "low risk" is still risk, that getting sick without dying is not without long-term health effects, and that vaccination is not only for you, but for your community.
Look at the death rates for people under 45...it's like 1 in 10,000. In some cities and for certain age brackets, you're more likely to be murdered or commit suicide than to die from Covid. The car accident fatality rate is roughly 1 in 10,000.
Vast majority of people who contract this illness don't even show symptoms at all. That's what's weird about this disease. It seems to affect the elderly disproportionately but for younger people and people with no risk factors, the risk is exceedingly low that one will experience SARS at all.
If you're not affected by covid-19 but something else you'll still have a problem if the hospital is overwhelmed due to covid-19. I've noticed various countries in Europe where they delayed various hospitalizations. Similarly, various people avoided going to a hospital while they usually would go.
How many people will have permanent problems (despite surviving) due to covid-19 is still unknown AFAIK.
Did they delay or avoid hospitalization because the hospitals are overwhelmed, or because treatments/diagnostics to their conditions were deemed non-essential or elective?
Yea, sorry, but I have to call anecdotal bs on these claims. Every person in the news I've seen that claims long term problems are obese individuals looking to make excuses. Other "damages" are so random and all over the place, it smells like correlation rather than causation. You know when someone might say they have head lice and your head gets all itchy suddenly, then you think you might have lice too. Theres a whole lot of that going on when it comes to relating other health problems to Covid. Dont forget, it's super sexy right now to be a covid survivor. People get a whole lot of attention for it.
For a forum that loves to call out anecdotal bias all the time, when it comes to Covid, everyone here jumps on the fear bandwagon of the news and on really poorly done studies with only a few dozen participants or epidemiologies.
> Every person in the news I've seen that claims long term problems are obese individuals looking to make excuses.
You should watch a more diverse media, then, because there are more than a few fabulously fit people who are no longer able to compete, or even continue, their sport.
Anecdotal and it sounds more like they have tiny heart syndrome flaring up. Part B, again, it's sexy to "Oh my goodness, my life is so difficult now since I survived covid. Look at me, I'm a covid survivor, my life is so altered." It's all cherry picked cases that the media are throwing out there. Cherry picked anecdotes, something in any other HN topic would get you lambasted.
What are you talking about? What drowning? The clinical picture hasn't been that different compared to previous years with outbreaks of respiratory illnesses. In fact in some countries the death rates have actually been lower. The only reason this year we are talking about it is because for some reason it became a huge media thing. There was no reason previous years to not talk about respiratory illnesses. They have always been serious thing and people are dying each year from them. They have always been dangerous to elderly people and people with other illnesses. I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe all of a sudden.
I know some childhood vaccinations are required here, but I’m not aware of any adult vaccinations that are generally required. Possibly flu shots for health care workers?
The point of having a vaccine is to stop the spread of the disease. For that to work, we may need to mandate that people are vaccinated, and I am ok with that.
I tend to agree with the "no mandataroy vaccination" thought.
I'm no anti-vaxxer, nor a believer in the "plandemic". But the vaccine should be voluntary and highly recommended for at risk groups. After all, they're the ones who would be impacted the most.
> I'm no anti-vaxxer, nor a believer in the "plandemic". But the vaccine should be voluntary and highly recommended for at risk groups. After all, they're the ones who would be impacted the most.
That would not work. The high risk group would then get infected by other people. A vaccine isn't perfect. Similarly for people affected where you did not know beforehand that they would have a bad effect.
It's not only the 'at risk' who would benefit from not getting the disease: many people who have been infected have not completely recovered, and it's not clear what the long term effects of the disease may be.
Other than that, if we want to stop the spread then a high percentage of people will need to be vaccinated, which is difficult when personal freedom is put above all else.
Not when the health outcomes will financially cripple us all. We simply can not afford to continue having mass outbreaks of this disease. It costs absolute fortunes to deal with the immediate crisis, and fortunes more over the long term dealing with survivors’ continued ill health. “My choice” is simply not compatible with maintaining a healthcare system or even a productive economy.
I'm a bit surprised to see so much opposition to vaccination here on HN, I would have thought that this would be a very pro-science and pro-vaccination crowd.
As far as my understanding goes, herd immunity is not a real alternative to vaccinations. Herd immunity means that a very large percentage of the population, spread evenly across every community, would have to be infected and recover, another commenter cited a source estimating between 50% and 80%[0].
This means getting basically everybody infected, the reason a vaccine would be necessary is that we don't want everybody to get infected because it carries significant risks to health and life with it.
Also the timeframe needed to reach such high percentages of immunity would be very long. Looking at the US, if you assume a continued infection rate of 50 000 new infections each day (much more would probably mean overwhelming hospital capacities) it would take 8 years just to reach the 50% threshold, 13 years to reach 80%.
Lot of time and suffering saved by going the vaccine route.
Not opposed to vaccines. Opposed to rushed, poorly tested, politicized pharmaceuticals. Poorly tested drugs have severe consequences. Just because you WANT a miracle, doesn't mean the first person offering one will actually help.
Fair enough, of course any vaccine that does get distributed to billions of people should be tested very, very carefully. Chances are the first option might not be the best one (see the vaccine that's being rolled out in Russia).
But the article is talking about the logistics of distributing an effective vaccine, once it's found, not distributing the first best thing someone happens to come up with. It seems pretty likely that at some point a safe and effective vaccine will be found. Should that vaccine not be distributed widely?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics
> A vaccine is also an attenuated version of the virus so if becoming immune from the virus doesn't last long it won't last long from a vaccine.
A vaccine can be an attenuated virus, or a piece of mRNA or DNA, or a distinctive viral protein. Which type of vaccine you use+the adjuvants that go with it can result in very different immune responses and efficacy over time.
> This is false, immunity is strong and long-lasting.
Immunity to COVID-19 varies a lot person to person and is poorly understood. It does however appear that many people can be reinfected (especially people who had mild symptoms the first time.)
A well documented one: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200720/Doctor-in-Israel-...
I looked at the sources for that article you posted and not one of them supported your claim. Not one. I even went several articles in because news medical dot net was using itself as a source.
There's no consensus at all, even remotely. I have no idea where you got that other than fear based news reporting.
I'm not going explain immunology to you but 99.9999% of viruses on the planet build long-term immunity if you survive. Coronavirus is the same way.
To put it another way..vaccine immunity operates the same way as infectious immunity.... do you think they are going to invest billions of dollars into a vaccine if immunity only lasts for a few months?
>mRNA is part of a pathway that creates a protein that is on the virus which the immune system reacts to.
>Please post your source saying that people can be re-infected.
And let's say everybody get vaccine in 2 weeks period of time, if the immunity doesn't last at least few years what's the point of this mass vaccination then.
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Nothing has this kind of success rates. Vaccine, if effective, reduces risk of vulnerable groups and transmission from their caretakers. Exactly like flu vaccination.
Heck, we have failed to eradicate polio in all countries, a level 1 virus much easier to control. I predict zero chance we can eradicate a level 2 virus right now.
And even if everybody did recover, there's the economic cost of an infection. Productivity missed because workers are sick at home, or worse in a hospital being cared for.
I'm not sure what the dollar figures are, but I would not be surprised if vaccinating a large population turns out to be significantly cheaper than having a small percentage of that large population in ICUs for weeks on end.
Having COVID without symptoms (asymptomatic) does not mean that you are immune and you are still infectious.
Edit:
> even now a lot of people are having covid w/o any symptoms at all
The last estimate I saw (last week I think) for Stockholm was that only roughly ten percent of the local population had COVID,
It is just mild enough. There's another one alphacoronavirus in about 5% of colds that is much worse. (Not counting SARS group.) Mind you parallel infection with multiple viruses is common.
It's hard to estimate prevalance because PCR testing has a large false negative rate. It depends highly on which day of the infection you're tested and even then the peak rate is still quite miserable for trying to find it.
Serorevalence is also tricky as we trade off false positive for false negative and the antibodies decline after a few months. That's not to say that memory B cells can't spin up production on demand though. Then there's the whole t-cell response which may play a bigger role in asymptomatic cases. All in all, its understood that antibody testing is underestimating infection rates.
Regardless of what values we think herd immunity should have, it's pretty clear that places like Sweden have seen the death peak and then tail off without any major change in distancing policies. If anything, people are relaxing more with time.
edit: I should mention that since march, we do have better treatment options and we have stepped up our game protecting care homes all over the world including Sweden which saw a majority of deaths from those facilities. This is why it's important to look at trends in other countries as well.
So at best it will be a perpetual game of cat and mouse, like it is with flu, but with higher stakes.
Because best case 0.1% death rate times best case 50% required for herd immunity times 7.8 billion people is 3.9 million dead people. And that's pretty bad.
Sweden Italy and New Zealand have already hit herd immunity. They're done with the virus and didn't have 50 percent.
And before you post that they have a few cases recently... understand herd immunity doesn't mean the virus is gone...it just means the virus has nowhere to jump to... so there will always be a smattering of cases.
And more importantly, even if the risk of death is low for me, I can still transmit it to high risk people.
And a lot of those who cram into public transportation during rush hour.
Otherwise you'll still overwhelm hospitals quickly in another runaway wave of infections.
It's long term physical damage even if you survive.
How many people will have permanent problems (despite surviving) due to covid-19 is still unknown AFAIK.
For a forum that loves to call out anecdotal bias all the time, when it comes to Covid, everyone here jumps on the fear bandwagon of the news and on really poorly done studies with only a few dozen participants or epidemiologies.
You should watch a more diverse media, then, because there are more than a few fabulously fit people who are no longer able to compete, or even continue, their sport.
Well, something seems to be different this year:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
I'm no anti-vaxxer, nor a believer in the "plandemic". But the vaccine should be voluntary and highly recommended for at risk groups. After all, they're the ones who would be impacted the most.
That would not work. The high risk group would then get infected by other people. A vaccine isn't perfect. Similarly for people affected where you did not know beforehand that they would have a bad effect.
But then, if this is like the seasonal flu, then we'd have to be vaccinated regularly?
As far as my understanding goes, herd immunity is not a real alternative to vaccinations. Herd immunity means that a very large percentage of the population, spread evenly across every community, would have to be infected and recover, another commenter cited a source estimating between 50% and 80%[0].
This means getting basically everybody infected, the reason a vaccine would be necessary is that we don't want everybody to get infected because it carries significant risks to health and life with it.
Also the timeframe needed to reach such high percentages of immunity would be very long. Looking at the US, if you assume a continued infection rate of 50 000 new infections each day (much more would probably mean overwhelming hospital capacities) it would take 8 years just to reach the 50% threshold, 13 years to reach 80%. Lot of time and suffering saved by going the vaccine route.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics
But the article is talking about the logistics of distributing an effective vaccine, once it's found, not distributing the first best thing someone happens to come up with. It seems pretty likely that at some point a safe and effective vaccine will be found. Should that vaccine not be distributed widely?