“Americans will be living with the coronavirus for decades”

Well, that’s cheerful news

8 thoughts on ““Americans will be living with the coronavirus for decades”

  1. This is SARS in the same sense a tomato is a fruit. Technically yes, practically no.

    1. That is what I thought too, Nature Mom, only better expressed. Perhaps Mr. Dark will enlighten us.

  2. Nonsense. Herd immunity would eventually happen. We’re not still dealing with SARS, and this is SARS 2.0.

    1. You didn’t read the analysis.

      While all the evidence is not in yet, it appears that herd immunity may be an irrelevant concept with this disease because the immunity itself is not “durable” – that is not say it is not only temporary, but very short-lived. There are indications that there will never be any kind of permanent immunity, ala measles, so at this point it appears our ability to contain the disease will consist of constant immunization and re-immunization, kind of like an annual flu shot, except it may have to be much more than once a year.

      The doctor points out that while it is theoretically possible to give everyone in the world a booster shot two or three times per year, it is unlikely that the world will ever get its act together that efficiently.

      (And certain countries which should know better are filled with idiots who will refuse to get the vaccinations at all.)

      1. Another, less fatalistic opinion:

        There have been many recent headlines about “fading antibodies,” but there’s way more to the immune response than antibodies. Quoting the above link:

        “All said, there’s reason for optimism that humans, at large, will achieve some form of lasting immunity to Covid-19 after an infection. ‘T cells response against coronaviruses appears long-lasting,’ Le Bert and Bertoletti write. In their studies, they’ve found that people who recovered from the original SARS 17 years ago still have T-cells that can respond to the virus.”

        From what I’ve read–from multiple legit sources, mind you–the jury’s largely still out on if anyone’s actually gotten COVID-19 twice. A few of the earliest reports were later tied to testing errors. With others, it was suggested negative tests between two positive tests could’ve simply been wrong. The tests aren’t always accurate (any M.D. will tell you common flu tests regularly have false negatives; they confirm much better than they rule out), and it’s tough to otherwise determine when exactly someone gets and stops being infected when they may have no symptoms or only mild symptoms mimicking allergy or a random cold. It’s possible patients can come down with something else within the length of time it takes them to fully shed viral material after recovery from the first infection.

        Even if there are true re-infections, humanity’s a big pool. Anything can happen once or twice or even a couple thousand times without it being a blanket representation of the entire world population.

        My biggest fear is given the sheer number of people this thing has infected and its rate of spread, it’s getting way too much opportunity to “learn” and adapt to human physiology, thus potentially enabling it to mutate into something even healthy people with no risk factors can’t fight off on their own. Granted, that’s not the direction individual viruses typically go. Since killing your host also means doom for you, the mutation path is typically one of becoming less fatal as opposed to more fatal over time.

        1. I’d classify that as a range of different opinions skewed to the positive side with the conclusion:
          “So the prospect of a vaccine, even at a record pace, should not be a reason to relax the effort to contain the virus. It will take YEARS to deliver the vaccine to billions of people around the world, and the virus may continue causing mayhem in the meantime. While we can’t control the immune response inside our bodies, we can set the stage for herd immunity by reducing the spread of Covid-19 now.”

    2. You sound like someone who awards themselves overnight Wikipedia degrees in specialist fields.

    3. Mr. Dark said: “…and this is SARS 2.0.”

      That seems like a remarkable thing to say. I remember SARS as being a wet firecracker. IIRC, There were not a lot of cases in the US. It certainly did not spread like wildfire. COVID is killing people by the thousand in the USA. Why do you say it is like SARS, Mr. Dark?

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