weiss27md wrote: ↑Mon May 18, 2020 6:01 am
I'm curious. They say people can get infected twice from this virus so how would a vaccine help?
Short answer: It may help by keeping people from dying from known strains when a vaccine becomes available. It may not help if the virus can mutate faster than new vaccines can be made. We don't know yet.
Long answer:
Viruses can be mutable. Some mutate very slowly. Others mutate quickly.
An example virus that's fairly mutable is the flu or influenza. It mutates to between one and three varieties in any given year, so the flu vaccine you got last fall may not work well for the flu variant that's coming next fall. However, because we're very familiar with flu, vaccines can be made for new variants a lot faster than can be made for a novel virus like SARS-COV2, the virus responsible for the disease Covid-19. We don't know enough about this virus to make a vaccine quickly.
A vaccine is basically like creating a code or hack for the immune system to tell the body what the enemy is before it can make a beachhead. If the vaccine is made incorrectly, it could cause the body to fight it's own cells. It would be bad if the cure is worse than the cause. That's why it takes so long to come up with a vaccine for a novel/new virus.
Since December I've heard that
there are at least 3 variants already. It may be more mutable than the flu. If this is the case, it makes SARS-COV2 worse. Why? It has an R0 (contagion) value of about 2.5. With a higher mutability rate and a higher contagion rate, the likelihood of getting it again seems high. Worse, it still can kill you the second time. If it is found to be very mutable, there is a remote possibility that we will never be able to create a vaccine to kill it at all. In which case, travel of any kind means increasing likelihood of death.
This was stopped with the SARS and MERS viruses earlier in this century because we had a pandemic task force in place. The virus never hit large cities where it could establish itself in the general population. If we had known enough about flu way back in 1918, we could have stopped it from ever getting into the general population too. But now we live with flu. Thousands of people actually die every year from flu, but we've learned to live with it as an acceptable loss. Life goes on?
Now we have something much
worse than the flu. It kills
hundreds of thousands in a year, even when we're
supposedly social distancing. Rest assured, it would have been far worse if we hadn't voluntarily sheltered in place and started using masks. Since we no longer have a pandemic task force, that layer of protection is gone. New and novel viruses used to be stopped every year or so. Again, SARS, MERS, Ebola...
All of these were stopped with quarantine, contact tracing and testing before they got into the general population because of our pandemic task force. At the same time I rest uneasy because the resources that stopped new viruses before are gone. There's no telling what the next virus will be like. We could see something mild like the flu. We could see something worse than SARS-COV2. This all layered on top of our, now,
two highly contagious gen-pop viruses, flu and SARS-COV2.
All of this could be stopped in three months if we all just hunkered down, everywhere in every home for three months, globally. Our economic system and governments aren't set up for that. We rely on long-distance trade and travel for the conveniences we love. It's hard to give that up, even for three months. Just three months of everyone simply not moving would slow down a lot of diseases. But we're not doing that. We're still moving around. So the virus will find a sustainable enviromnent and "live" with us, killing just enough of us that we'll grow used to the new acceptable loss, just like before we had vaccines. It's almost like Mother Nature is intentionally finding ways to reduce our population because we're not doing it ourselves. It was bound to happen. Here it is, made manifest. This
is the zombie apocalypse your government pandemic task force warned you about.
Life as we know it has changed all because of one virus in the general population. Try not to imagine what it will be like with the
next novel virus.
Chris
They just came here cause their governor is a jerk.
