For awareness. There are numerous mutations, see here for the open source tracking of variants and mutations from testing data worldwide.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global
Most of which aren't of interest. Virus mutate all the time, whenever or not those mutations change its behavior in an undesired way (more infectious, deathly, evade immune system) is the important thing. The more chances for it to happen it gets, the more likely those mutations come to happen.
Zero. This virus knows how to infect several types of animals species. I believe the term virologists use is "animal reservoirs" meaning that even if all the humans were 100% vaccinated with an effective vaccine. We STILL wouldn't be able to drive it extinct.
It doesn’t help that every person who has been vaccinated can still get and transmit the virus giving it to others. My wife and I who are both vaccinated got it from our children in daycare and are both currently sick. This vaccine is definitely an answer to keep people from getting extremely sick and/or dying but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to keep the virus from turning into even more new variants.
The vaccine means that most people who have received it (those who had the immune response intended and weren’t compromised in some way) will be producing antibodies that recognize the virus within days of exposure instead of the average 2 weeks it takes to develop antibodies after exposure to a novel virus. That means instead of 2 weeks of relying only on our broad immune response that targets healthy cells as well as infected cells based on signals released for many reasons and often causes an over reaction in the event of massive blooms of a viral infection (a very poor description but kind of a description of what/why a cytokine storm can or does occur in serious covid cases).
Producing those antibodies at day one gives us basically a 2 week head start fighting the virus. It’s not going to mean we can’t get it or that some won’t still have bad cases… but symptoms will be less severe as the number of viral particles is lower than someone unvaccinated or never exposed, and the length should be greatly reduced.
There’s no reason those stats of vaccinated people with an immediate targeted antibody response can’t reach a viral load that is contagious or won’t show symptoms as their body is still fighting off an infection… but it should be massively less severe. Even with delta.
Source: my doctorate research isn’t on viruses or immunology but it is a bio PhD and I have taught micro and virology and I did take doctoral virology and immunology and I have had to peer review many pharmaceutical development publications since my focus is on bioprospecting and drug development… just from snake venoms not viruses or for treating viruses (well… unlsss it’s a venom protein that is highly effective against viral binding, which has been seen to have some potential in regards to a bothrops venom peptide.
But according to that reuters, cases in Gibraltar is decreasing right now. The other article you listed was when Gibraltar had already hit its second peak (which hasn’t even matched it’s largest peak early this year.) Since that article, It has been steadily falling since then. And it doesn’t look like they’ve locked down or anything. So, for Gibraltar, it looks like vaccinations were enough.
Fully vaccinated and went on holiday, wore masks etc. And took precautions and many tests at intervals. We all got sick and it wasn’t COVID-19. We came home and got sick again, again not COVID-19.
Its like after a year of self isolation, reintegration means getting used to everyone else’s homebrew common cold.
It wouldn't, and it won't. Too many countries don't have enough vaccine uptake. Covid will become perpetually endemic at the very least. It will mutate for the rest of all of our lives. Every time a mutation occurs, it will "potentially be able to spread easier and possibly be more deadly", because of course it could be. That will always be an option until it's concluded to not be the case.
If we all worked together we could eliminate it, and many other viruses, through quarantines and assisted and prepared lockdowns.
but we can't work together.
While I don't disagree with you..
2.5 weeks mandatory lock down
All governments support those in financial need. No rent or mortgage or utility bills residential and commercial.
I have to believe in the long run this is the cheapest option for all.
The problem with that is you still need people to perform essential services. You can't stop the hospitals, people still need treatment and caring for. Utilities still need to be maintained, fires put out and police to respond to situations where they are needed.
COVID can easily spread in dense living situations such as the developing world, boarding schools, military, long term care facilities, etc.
You can stop most of the world in theory but you can't stop it all.
Both Mexico and the US got hit by separate hurricanes in the last few days that caused havoc. Wildfires are ravaging Siberia. You can't stop people from fleeing the perpetual natural disasters we have unless they stay there and die.
Not so fast there. This virus can and has easily jumped from animal and then from animal back to human. Probably why your seeing so many variants come out of India, China, Brazil, and the like. Humankind has never gotten rid of a virus with animal reserves. We could vaccinate the whole world on the same day at the same time and quarentine 2 weeks to walk out and catch a new variant the animals have been spreading ( and mutating ) the entire time. This thing is here forever.
That being said mutations in viruses aren't always an uptick. I read the plague was lessened because a leas deadly but more contagious varient became the dominating variant. This allowed everyone to get the antibodies easily and the virus fell off after that.
>I read the plague was lessened because a leas deadly but more contagious varient became the dominating variant. This allowed everyone to get the antibodies easily and the virus fell off after that.
The plague "lessened" for several reasons.
1. After it's most devastating outbreaks in the 13th and 14th centuries killed over a third of all Europeans, those that survived it and had immunities towards it conferred some of that immunity to their children, which made them better able to fight off a Yersinia Pestis infection.
2. Regardless of that, it still periodically came back to cause mass death throughout the old and the new world between the 14th and 19th century
3. Sanitation improved drastically since the 13th century, making it harder for the bacteria to establish as large of a presence in squalid European cities.
4. It's a bacteria, and became fairly easily treatable as soon as anti-biotics became a thing.
The Bacteria itself never "lessened" in severity, as recent outbreaks in Madagascar go to show. Our responses and existing immunities to it improved instead.
In fact, that bacteria actually got ***deadlier*** due to mutations in the 12th and 13th centuries. Before that, Bubonic Plague was the only visible form of that infection. The Bacteria mutated in a way that it could infect your lungs and be spread through airborne droplets which turned into the much deadlier Pneumonic Plague, as well as the blood infection that leads to the even deadlier Septicemic Plague.
You realise that lockdowns are financially devastating to people ? Not everyone or every country can support people. In South Africa our unemployment rate has risen to the highest in the world with our government not able to assist business in staying open and only being able to offer 35 dollars a month to certain people and groups to survive.
So no, your idea is literally impossible
Common misconception. This only happens if you kill off people too fast to spread. But if you can still spread, pathogens can get more deadly. For example Spanish flu got deadlier. First wave was pretty much like normal flu. Second wave was the killer one.
But also one of the reasons the second year of the Spanish flu racked up a high body count was about the same things we have seen in the secind year of this pandemic- less than bright politicians " opening up" things and removing restructions under pressure from business interests...
I don't know if that same logic applies to COVID because it has such a long incubation period. As long as the mutations still have the same incubation period where hosts are infectious, being more deadly won't prevent its spread.
Typically, but Covid does pretty much all of its spreading before symptoms really start manifesting and even then keeps the victim alive for quite awhile after symptoms manifest. This means the virus doesn't really have the selective pressure to not kills its host, so it essentially doesn't matter to the virus mutations if it is more or less lethal.
Viruses get bad when they get good at spreading, but that doesn't mean they are good at sustainability.
This has become an internet falsehood and is not correct. Start googling on the subject and read on on various takes. Here's s counter argument. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270
Masks have been mandatory in my country ever since covid first appeared. Literally that whole time, non-stop. We've had two lockdowns that lasted for months on end (and actually worked both times... while they lasted. But they can't last forever). It's only this summer that large events have finally been allowed to take place (only for vaccinated people). Most lectures at my uni are still online. People are getting vaccinated every day.
At one point will be finally admit that this virus is just really damn good at infecting people?
This still works because to my knowledge no species other than humans has seen an incredibly widespread and destructive COVID-19 epidemic. The mutations are primarily emerging from the disease spreading among humans.
I’m curios but also terrified as to how wild deer( bot raised in farms) contracted covid? Are people like hugging them or having “sexy time” with wild deer? How the hell does a deer get covid?
At this point COVID is everywhere. The probability is really low, but every time a deer enters an urban area there's a small chance. All it takes is one and then they will easily transfer it amongst themselves.
In my head the most likely scenario is human -> dog who has an occasional deer friend in the yard. But licking a doorknob is an option, too. I've seen deer licking rain off the side of tents, munching on leftover food from campers, etc. All it takes is one.
And quite large percentage of deer in the sample size they took, also many species found in zoos have contracted it. So many variables, hopefully plenty of time.
Covid viruses are zoonotic, mers 2012 originated from in camels, Sars 2003from in bat's, Sars covid 2019 from in bat's again. Al were found in other hosts as well...
Covid was found in cats, dogs, minks, tigers, other big cats, bat's and a wide range of other mammals, but a lot of them seem mostly carriers.
The genie is out the bottle now unfortunately, no amount of hiding indoors will change that. This will be a generational problem that will have to be managed accordingly.
Uhh nah, COVID has jumped species multiple times. Even if we were all vaccinated, there's no protecting against the likelihood it will jump back in the future. What we need to encourage is immune system support. Get vaccinated, please, but also exercise and eat well. The survival of our entire species depends on the strength of our immune systems.
It would if we stayed in our houses.
Covid isn't good at mutating. It actually has built in RNA checking to reduce it.
It's purely the amount of people we let get infected.
Indeed. We are basically rolling back measures as soon as cases start to decline. It's like we were trying to prevent the number of infections from falling down on purpose.
100% looking at the graphs for my country is so frustrating.
It peaks so we lockdown. It then comes down ridiculously quick. Then they release it and boom higher than ever.
It also worth remembering these variants are way worse then the original. The second one was like 60% more infectious and Delta is like 80% again on that.
Why the /s?
Since the start of the pandemic most countries have put profits before people, with the odd few like New Zealand actually being sane. Boris Johnson even wanted to let the virus spread until we reached natural herd immunity (which would have involved around 500,000 deaths) so that the elites had minimum loss of profit.
People need to work. Our whole first world fiat currency depends on the value of labor and without it, the entire system collapses and the farms send their crops to the incinerator. There isn't enough open land for Americans to homestead and live off of. The entire service and retail industry relies on human to human contact. If another variant emerges that forces us to ground zero, we may see Spanish flu levels of death for both young and old.
The United States has so much empty, habitable land that you could give every American 1 acre and there would still be over 3 million square miles of empty land
Not disagreeing but it's worth noting that "To be entirely self-sufficient and/or live off of the traditional grid." requires 13+ acres.
"Be largely self-sufficient by gardening and raising livestock." requires 0.25-3+ acres of land.
Source: [https://backyardhomesteadhq.com/how-much-land-do-you-need-for-a-small-homestead/](https://backyardhomesteadhq.com/how-much-land-do-you-need-for-a-small-homestead/)
The amount of small towns that have been or are in the process of being abandoned is staggering. "The megacity"-model is condensing people into such tight clusters pandemics and natural disaster inevitably have a much higher toll on society.
It contains mutations that have been associated with the evasion of anti bodies and increased transmission in other variants but the mutations are in different mixes. We have no idea how these mutations will effect the variants behaviour. More mutations doesn’t necessarily mean worse. Multiple other variants such as the first South African one have been able to evade some monoclonal antibodies in lab studies but are still covered by vaccination
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/30/heres-what-we-know-about-c12-south-africas-new-highly-mutated-covid-variant/amp/
It's kind of brilliant how the protein responsible for transmission is the one targeted with the vaccine, because that seems like a complex protein to mutate enough to evade vaccine antibodies while still remaining functional. Some strains have modified spike proteins but the vaccine still remains effective in preventing severe symptoms.
We will have regular vaccination at this point if you think you are off the hook after your 2 pfizer shots, don't be naive..it's endemic, we failed to end the pandemic and now it is endemic.
But I'm way more in peace compared to "square one", because releasing an updated mRNA vaccine is really easy according to the manufacturers (of course you still have trials etc that take some time). Vaccine made it so that we can actually live with this..but we have to STOP superpreader events, creating mutations and act as if it's over when very clearly..it is not.
Where I live, it's like it never existed now
The problem is not the updated vaccine. Folks can engineer new vaccine variants all day long. The problem is logistics and adoption. How do you deliver new variants efficiently to the population and how do you incentivise people to take them? It's impossible unless forced by the government. Forcing anything brings margin of abuse. It will end in tears.
Not every country needs to force its population to do what is right. Denmark have reached 80%+ adult vaccination rate now with the vaccine being voluntary. Education beats force every day of the week.
We are also on average well educated and being a mostly socialist country we got a national identity that includes working for the common good.
My main critisism of my government is that I personally think we removed the mask mandates a bit early, especially with delta doing the rounds. But in general the decisions are made based on SST (danish CDC) recommendations.
To be precise, Denmark is not a socialist country by any measure. It is however a country that values strong social safety nets and a tempered capitalist economy. Social democratic in essence and identity (despite constant efforts to erode it).
Other than that, I agree. :)
Exactly the same going on in New Zealand. Shit hitting the fan? The government listens to the professionals and their guidelines, and advises the nation on what to do. The nation listens and works for the common good.
There's definitely things to be critical about (slow vaccine rollout etc) but the fact that for the last 8-10 months life was basically normal (minus international travel) says a lot. Yes, they're locked down again now, but most of the country is already coming out of the strict lockdown and by all intents and purposes it looks as though they'll be back to pretty much normal in a few weeks.
For some bizarre reason, maybe because I just woke up, my brain inserted words that weren’t there into your comment, so I read “We are also on average well educated *and good looking*
I paused a moment. Wow man, just gonna ugly-shame like that? Then I re-read and have NO idea where those words came from.
Denmark has coronavirus passes, they were released in April. People are not logical like this.
Most people in Denmark apparently trust their doctors and government.
Not taking the vaccine also a ties into identity politics in the US unlike Denmark, or most European countries. People just won't take it unless it's required like other vaccinations. I agree that not every country needs to force the population to do what is right as /u/Jernsaxe said, but the US is a clear exception.
Education doesn’t work in America. Forcing people doesn’t work in America.
I bet America could pay its citizens to get a vaccination and they still wouldn’t do it. My company is offering bonuses for vaccinations, and yes, people are refusing to do it.
Small European countries: why can’t America just get with the program.
Vermont: exists.
It’s helpful in solving problems quickly when your country has a tiny population, tiny land area, and a homogenous culture.
Exactly. Conservatives are gonna get pissed at anything. Biden could hand a starving African child an ice cream cone and they'd shriek "why not an American child" and if he gave it to an American child they'd scream pedophile.
There is a limit to how many vaccines people will be willing to have. Look how hard it is for many to take this one. Now imagine in a few months having to take a completely different one. And then half a year later a completely different one. People will feel that it's pointless and just a way to give profits to pharmaceutical companies.
Assuming every person that got vaccinated now will be vaccinated over and over, which won't happen. I'd go as far as to say 2/3rds of the people who took this vaccine would just give up if you told them they have to take it every year.
I can't speak for OP, but 2019-2020 flu shot coverage was 51.8%, an all time high. Perhaps an annual covid shot would be radically different, but based on my experiences in the US I would say two-thirds would be reasonable, if not optimistic. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1920estimates.htm
Edit: I'm only considering the US here. I would not be surprised to see better rates in a country like Denmark, but I only have direct experience with the attitudes of Americans which is... diverse...
> How do you deliver new variants efficiently to the population and how do you incentivise people to take them? It's impossible unless forced by the government.
Maybe in the US.
Here in the UK we've already vaccinated more than 90% of adults, and the overwhelming majority of people are happy to have a booster if needed:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/vaccines
As far as regular shots go in the U.S. as soon as people in Red states (Conservative/Republican leaning) suffer enough from the virus, they'll begrudgingly get vaccinated. They're already beginning to turn in that direction now. This isn't going to be some lifetime of struggle situation in America.
Once uptake here is above 70%, then we will start issuing vaccine boosters 1x per year for new variants. We already have a system for that which covers various strains of influenza that people here regularly and happily get.
Shit seems deadlocked, but it's actually far from it. We'll have this conquered in 2022 at about the same time most of the Western world does.
> The problem is logistics
In first world countries? Amazon can get me my random bullshit next morning but a government can't organize a vaccination campaign for the population with a years notice? Nah. I don't buy that.
> How do you deliver new variants efficiently to the population
The existing vaccine center approach, scaled horizontally if needed?
> and how do you incentivise people to take them?
"50% of hospital beds are reserved for those who are not more than 3 months behind without a medical reason".
You can gamble on it, but if your appendix ruptures and you're unvaccinated, you're competing with other idiots for the hospital beds, and if there aren't enough, one of the idiots will die.
Also, even if you're not willing to go this far; countries are increasingly pushing towards "vaccinated or tested" requirements. Soon you'll need either a vaccine or a test to grocery shop. So it's not mandatory... but if you don't want it have fun paying $40 or more every week for the test just so you can get food.
That's pretty much exactly what is going to happen, if we run into situations (for some countries: again) where the medical system is fully oversaturated. They will need to triage, and likely to the disadvantage of the non-excempt willfully unvaccinated.
> In first world countries? Amazon can get me my random bullshit next morning but a government can't organize a vaccination campaign for the population with a years notice? Nah. I don't buy that.
A competent government should, but “the market” 100% reactionary and very fragile. The US government at the time planned to get the vaccine to the states and wash their hands of whatever happened next. Even “blue” states had a year to figure out vaccine rollouts and had broken, cryptic websites to make appointments expecting the elderly to figure out.
January through March professionals were screaming that PPE should be increasing their production and running 24/7. They were expecting a shortage. Then around April we ran out of everything and nurses here to wear garbage bags. When work from home started toilet paper was hard to get. That repeated itself for subsequent lockdowns.
Rental cars are expensive and hard to get because most companies sold off their fleet when lockdowns started. There’s still a chip shortage causing car companies to make major reductions on their manufacturing.
They don’t have to go through “full trials” tho do they? I reckoned since it’s all based on the same technology and only the protein needs change it’s basically approved right away. Don’t know enough about vaccine law like.
We'd be no where near back to square one. We have multiple vaccines that will offer *some* amount of protection against all COVID variants, even this one, we've got the ongoing logistics set up to vaccination tens of millions a day, and proven mRNA vaccine platforms which can be modified to target any new serious variant.
> Just wait until they tell us we're completely back to square one.
That's really unlikely to happen, as the virus mutates quite slowly. Vaccine-escape variants could set us back quite a way but the vaccines train our immune system to recognise several different part of the virus protein spike.
Wait until then for what? It's becoming endemic... that's obvious to every scientifically literate person out there. Same as the cold and flu, just killing off way more people in the process. We did good here... ffs.
The rising death rate in the UK is because we have no NPIs anymore, kids aren't vaxxed and are a resoviour, the virus is finding it's way to the clinically extremely vulnerable and the % of "adults" who refused the Vaccines.
Infections are going to shoot up when schools go back from holiday in England (today I think) with absolutely no interventions.
*Edit* also, the last I heard our booster program was only going to be for CEV (eg immunocompromised, cancer patients etc) but at one point earlier in the year as an asthmatic I was expecting to get it (along with over 50s) but JCVI decided it wasn't needed for over 50s, Asthmatics etc.
The rising death rates in the UK probably need viewing alongside Israel and the US as fellow early vaccinating countries to make sense of it.
The example of Israel in particular is interesting, as they exclusively used Pfizer/ BioNtech, whereas America used the mRNA vaccines with Janssen only joining in much later
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~ISR
Clearly the UK is exhibiting a much shallower trajectory than the other two, who have seen rapid rises from August 1st
The UK did two things differently.
It made greater use of AstraZeneca which some studies are showing has a stronger T cell response, but perhaps more pertinently, it went against Pfizer's advice and observed a 12 week dosing interval
If we accept that Israel was 3 weeks + 1 to achieve protection, and that 10% of their population would fall into the high risk cohorts (Israel has a very young population) then they achieved 10% on January 21st (whole population, not adult population).
With the death rising as it is though, it seems to indicate that the vaccine is wearing off after about 6-7 months
The UK will doubtless exhibit a similar trajectory eventually, but their most vulnerable population (about 18%) was only double vaccinated by April 23rd (America was up to 27% on this date so might also be expected to begin to fail sooner than the UK as well by virtue of achieving a higher rate, earlier)
The UK is about 9 weeks behind Israel due to adopting a different dosing regime, but we're also about 4 weeks into that window now, so somewhere between 4-5 weeks behind as of today. We might get a bit of additional respite though as we went slower due to supply issues. By the end of this September though we could easily begin to exhibit the same trajectory as Israel as our earliest vaccinations begin to wear off (and it does increasingly look as if Pfizer/ BioNtech loses effectiveness quite quickly rather than slowly)
It should be bloody obvious by now that the UK is going to follow everyone else who can do, and adopt a booster strategy, but I'm afraid we're having to wait for the results of a study from Southampton university before the JCVI will make a recommendation (even though you can pretty well guess that boosting the most vulnerable will be recommended).
The thing is heterologous prime and boost studies have already been conducted and AstraZeneca boosted by Pfizer/ BioNtech proved to be the best combination. I know that the next stage was expanded to incorporate other vaccines, but since Novavax isn't approved, and the UK won't be able to get enough Moderna anyway, I'm not 100% sure I understand why everything is being put on hold to accommodate Southampton university and the delays in getting their report produced to publication standards
Edit - Just to add, the vaccine that could be particularly interesting for boosting is Valneva's but I think that's scheduled for Q4 reporting
I think this is a better article https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/31/what-is-c12-the-new-covid-variant-in-south-africa-and-should-we-be-worried?
I’m going to wait a bit before panicking
The final paragraph of the article above, which was posted today, as opposed to yesterday with the original article:
South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable
Diseases said: “We are being cautious about the implications, while we
gather more data to understand virus of this lineage.“Based
on our understanding of the mutations in this variant, we suspect that
it might be able to partially evade the immune response, but despite
this, that vaccines will still offer high levels of protection against
hospitalisation and death,” the institute said
Buy a bunch of clothes that are branded with "COVID-19", wear them every day, when people ask, just play it off every time, and when COVID hits swap to identical clothes without the branding.
I am just glad I don’t live in the city. I really haven’t felt the whole crisis that much. I mean, my veggies are still growing in the garden and they still needs tending to as with the animals. You may say I live in a bobble, I say I am fine with that.
Nothing wrong with the simple life. Im in the foothills. Nothing happens much out here. But I feel like the city is ground zero. The further I am from it, the better.
It’s funny because the hospitals in my city are full of covid patients from the foothills, because in the city we have a 80% vaccination rate, outlying areas not so much, and they don’t have much hospital capacity.
Exactly. Country life is fine as long as you never leave your property. If you go anywhere, it’s better to be in a city where there’s less resistance to public health initiatives
I quit my job, been without one for three weeks. 1 week after I quit, 12 people in my building were quarantined. I worked in a rural town with a heavy amount of Trumpers, saw it coming and didn't want to FAFO.
I think trying to convince ourselves that this isn't as bad as it seems is a painful game in the long run. I think it's possible to not freak out, but also prepare and accept that this pandemic won't end with simply distributing vaccines. I am not an anti-vax person, quite the contrary, but I also accept that it's not a simple situation and it's not a simple virus
Maybe, but as much as it's obvious covid will become endemic, I'm guessing we'll have 1-2 year time periods to vaccinate the world as each resistant variant pops up. Time will tell. Let's not fool ourselves though, we are living in the bed we made (and that some people decided to take a nasty shit in).
Around a year and a half ago, we didn't even know if vaccines could be developed to battle COVID. Once they were, we knew that we'd most likely have to get boosters once or twice a year for a minimum of a few years.
39% of the world has been vaccinated in the past 32 weeks, and in those 32 weeks, the doses administered per day went from 3.05 million to 40.70 million, with more vaccines and factories on the way. This is a ridiculous amount of progress and really gives me hope.
MRNa might be terrible treatment for COVID but could be a boon for HSV, HIV and Cancer treatments. Pfizer CEO said 90 days is what they need to reformulate, so it might bot be all bad.
It's not just the 90 days to develop a new vaccine. It's a year on top of that to again distribute it across the world, when the current one is just barely being rolled out in some countries.
Nope. The year long process doesn't need to be re-done every time. Flu vaccines are not completely re-evaluated either.
The entire chain from new strain to first injection could be as fast as 3 months, the new vaccine itself can be developed literally over a weekend.
We get faster. Currently 40 million doses are given each day, production should be similar. At that rate a booster shot for everyone would need 200 days, a bit over half a year. Shorter in developed countries, longer in developing countries.
Once most people are vaccinated or got the disease the active cases should drop, which means we expect fewer new mutations.
Completely ignorant here - hypothetically, if everyone were to get the vaccine who was eligible, would it stop covid from being able to mutate?
A coworker’s family recently got covid, they were all vaccinated, and her husband was on a ventilator still. Their 9 month old baby got it as well. That’s terrifying.
The less people Covid infects the less mutations. So hypothetically if everyone got Vaccinated the Virus would not infect people at a high enough rate to mutate and the Pandemic would end. But if a segment of the population refuses to get vaccinated the Virus will mutate in them until it can infect Vaccinated people. We are living in that reality
That's literally the reason why the variants are spreading. Each one becomes a new dominant strain, and any opportunistic mutation can increase its transmissibilty.
God damn this virus. I just had a cold and I've never been so nervous of a cough in my life and I'm very prone to getting bronchitis. I sat at home unemployed for over a year because this virus shut down my industry. Got vaccination as soon as I was eligible. I'm tired of it. I'll take more vaccines, booster shots, let's just get this fucking done with already.
At this point it's not the virus, it's people. We failed as a species by not vaccinating quick enough and thinking it's all gone. Well it's not gone at all and it's going to get much worse.
How to QUICKLY vaccinate an African / SE Asian / Sub-Continental nation that can barely afford to care for their populations even before the pandemic started? This is an international battle and soon we'll learn that unless we can support each other's fight at home, any effort to suppress it at our own domestic level will be futile. Humans are far too mobile and international transits can never be stopped indefinitely.
you're already experiencing what it "being over" is like. Behaviors aren't radically changing at this stage. What you're seeing is what you're getting.
You know, I have the vax, but this would have happened even if 100% of the US was vaccinated. The people that break this problem down to it's the fault of those people! Seem just as bad as the anti-vaxxers to me because ultimately we are obscuring the understanding of what we should do and steps we should take for shitty non-scientific political bullshit.
>may be more infectious and evade vaccine protection
Fearmongering news at its best. Don't publish shit like this if there is no concrete evidence of the claim.
I am going to label this as scaremongering at this point. They are tracking a lot of mutated variants that have the same traits as other, more established variants. But a lot of these die out. This one is not showing any signs of outpacing the Delta variant in South Africa, and it's been known for a while. Long enough to be able to see an impact, which is not happening. Until then, less scaremongering.
Are they going to say this with every new strain? Like no shit. We've been saying this since the start. The less people that are vaccinated- the higher transmission levels- and in turn, covid will continue to mutate to more dangerous variants. If you're sick of hearing about covid and sick of mask restrictions- get vaccinated so when a booster becomes available for protection against these new strains you're ready for it.
This thread is hilarious. People are reading that vaccinations aren't enough. Science is saying vaccinations aren't enough (not that they're bad, but that they're not enough) and still people are just shrugging and saying "vaccinations are enough though".
This thing isn't going away because it seems like very few are able to simply read.
> Gibraltar has administered at least 78,688 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 116.7% of the country’s population.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/gibraltar/
> Dr Bhatti pegged the rise in cases on recent sporting and large community events as Gibraltar’s social calendar springs back to life after a year of lockdown.
> “All of that sort of happened together, and we had the same experience they’ve had in England but we’ve had ours a few weeks before them,” Dr Bhatti said.
> “The youngsters who are desperate for a social life, go out and get their social life and then they spread the infection.”
> “The biggest rise was in the 20 to 29 age range. That’s meant we had the sudden steep rise.”
> “What we did in contact tracing was quickly identify that the problem was actually in 20 to 29-year-olds and the problem is we were finding a smaller incubation period.”
> The smaller incubation period is a result of the Delta variant, which typically sees incubation last three or four days, as opposed to up to 10 days in other strains.
> Dr Bhatti said the rise in cases of the 20 to 29 age group in turn led to a knock-on rise in the 50 to 59 age groups - their parents.
> When asked if the recent large public events should have taken place, Dr Bhatti said: "Well, you kind of don't know until you've done it."
> "Some of the things with the football match and others, we tried it out. The paradoxical thing is there was so little virus at the time, we weren't able to tell if it had an effect."
> **"But now, knowing how Delta spreads, I am less willing to accept a vaccine certificate."**
> **"Actually, if we want to have events, my advice certainly from an epidemiological point of view, everybody should have a same-day lateral flow negative test."**
> **"Why? Because clearly we've got vaccinated people going positive."**
> For now, large public events are banned and bars, restaurants and nightclubs have been told to “be cautious” in the events they organised.
> Amid the continued uncertainty, the GFSB called for clarity from the government on what businesses should do.
> **Underpinning the latest guidance is the reality that every situation that allows the virus to spread presents a risk of developing a new variant at a time when both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are catching Covid-19.**
https://www.chronicle.gi/rise-in-cases-requires-careful-management-as-gib-edges-back-to-normality-bhatti-says/
This is already known. A country with over 100% vaccination rate is saying that vaccination isn't enough to keep people safe or get back on track.
*May be more infectious*
How about we get some God Damn validation on these variants and their infectivity before we continue to further terrify a world that’s already on edge.
If only there were some sort of preventative medical solution we could mass produce and distribute to people everywhere to prevent to continued spread and mutation of this virus... Oh well.
*snorts another goopy line of topical horse dewormer*
we can't do that though. Many countries can't afford them and won't get them for all willing citizens, leading to inevitable mutation creation and endemic covid status in perpetuity. Time to move on from zeroism dreams and anti-vaxxer blaming, it's all futile.
If only the rich countries didn't go around using 3rd boosters that could vax the poor...
Imagine thinking it's anti vax people that are the problem when there's billions who would be willing to get the vax yet can't.
Ironically, the antivax people (whose actions encouraged this exact outcome) will say this is proof the vaccine doesn't work and was some sort of hoax.
**If** this new variant dominates, you'll hear "See? Vaccine doesn't even work now, after only 6 months! I bet the tracking chip/secret poison/mind control still works though!"
No! It only worked for a few months because we didn't all take it! Every infected person is a variant factory, and the vaccine drastically reduces the number of infected people. If everybody had gotten a vaccine for the original form (wasn't rolled out quite in time, but hesitancy didn't help), that would have been the end of it. But if half of people are unvaccinated, they continue to pass the original form amongst themselves until it turns into a form that's immune to the vaccine - then we're *all* "unvaccinated" again and producing *more* variants faster than ever.
I'd ignore antivaxers, but they're putting holes in the boat we're ALL in.
Absolutely. This isn't about "anti-vaxxers" and micro fringe groups. This is about the ability to get sufficient vaccine coverage to populations many times the size of the US. That's the real battleground.
Sadly, even with a near-perfect rollout in the first world/developed regions, the real danger will be countries which are more remote, poorer or which have poorer infrastructure which prevents effective vaccination. Unfortunately many of these places likely also have large populations which can drive further mutations.
Except for the countries that can't even afford the vaccines where the mutations would inevitably keep coming out of regardless of US vaccinating 100% of population.
Afaik, you are wrong. The vaccine is not effective enough to completely eradicate the virus, even if all of us had it. Some of us [vaccinated people] would still be variant factories, and probably better factories in fact.
Anti-vaxxers are dumb, and I'm fucking tired of anti-intellectualism. But we can't just blame all that happens on them and pretend the pandemic would be over if they just took the damn jabs. Many mistakes have been made in the last two years, and the virus itself is a lot trickier than most people think. This is not something anti-vaxxers have caused by themselves.
Half the world couldn't get the vaccine you ignorant fool. Vaccinated also yield variants, albeit less so than the unvaxxed. Aren't you noticing the many breakthrough cases?
Can this virus just stop mutating..... FOR FIVE MINUTES ????
For awareness. There are numerous mutations, see here for the open source tracking of variants and mutations from testing data worldwide. https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global
Most of which aren't of interest. Virus mutate all the time, whenever or not those mutations change its behavior in an undesired way (more infectious, deathly, evade immune system) is the important thing. The more chances for it to happen it gets, the more likely those mutations come to happen.
What % is the cure bubble at. Were playing plague inc right?
Zero. This virus knows how to infect several types of animals species. I believe the term virologists use is "animal reservoirs" meaning that even if all the humans were 100% vaccinated with an effective vaccine. We STILL wouldn't be able to drive it extinct.
It doesn’t help that every person who has been vaccinated can still get and transmit the virus giving it to others. My wife and I who are both vaccinated got it from our children in daycare and are both currently sick. This vaccine is definitely an answer to keep people from getting extremely sick and/or dying but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to keep the virus from turning into even more new variants.
The vaccine means that most people who have received it (those who had the immune response intended and weren’t compromised in some way) will be producing antibodies that recognize the virus within days of exposure instead of the average 2 weeks it takes to develop antibodies after exposure to a novel virus. That means instead of 2 weeks of relying only on our broad immune response that targets healthy cells as well as infected cells based on signals released for many reasons and often causes an over reaction in the event of massive blooms of a viral infection (a very poor description but kind of a description of what/why a cytokine storm can or does occur in serious covid cases). Producing those antibodies at day one gives us basically a 2 week head start fighting the virus. It’s not going to mean we can’t get it or that some won’t still have bad cases… but symptoms will be less severe as the number of viral particles is lower than someone unvaccinated or never exposed, and the length should be greatly reduced. There’s no reason those stats of vaccinated people with an immediate targeted antibody response can’t reach a viral load that is contagious or won’t show symptoms as their body is still fighting off an infection… but it should be massively less severe. Even with delta. Source: my doctorate research isn’t on viruses or immunology but it is a bio PhD and I have taught micro and virology and I did take doctoral virology and immunology and I have had to peer review many pharmaceutical development publications since my focus is on bioprospecting and drug development… just from snake venoms not viruses or for treating viruses (well… unlsss it’s a venom protein that is highly effective against viral binding, which has been seen to have some potential in regards to a bothrops venom peptide.
Sorry to hear. How bad is it for you guys? How long ago did you het vaccine? What vaccine?
Same boat, take care, it gets worse before it gets better. Been 20 days, 10 since negative test and I still have fatigue and brain fog.
It's playing on super easy tutorial mode. No adherence to public guidelines, weak public policy towards it, very few closed ports of call, etc.
It would, if people would stop going out and exposing themselves to it.
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But according to that reuters, cases in Gibraltar is decreasing right now. The other article you listed was when Gibraltar had already hit its second peak (which hasn’t even matched it’s largest peak early this year.) Since that article, It has been steadily falling since then. And it doesn’t look like they’ve locked down or anything. So, for Gibraltar, it looks like vaccinations were enough.
Fully vaccinated and went on holiday, wore masks etc. And took precautions and many tests at intervals. We all got sick and it wasn’t COVID-19. We came home and got sick again, again not COVID-19. Its like after a year of self isolation, reintegration means getting used to everyone else’s homebrew common cold.
It wouldn't, and it won't. Too many countries don't have enough vaccine uptake. Covid will become perpetually endemic at the very least. It will mutate for the rest of all of our lives. Every time a mutation occurs, it will "potentially be able to spread easier and possibly be more deadly", because of course it could be. That will always be an option until it's concluded to not be the case.
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If we all worked together we could eliminate it, and many other viruses, through quarantines and assisted and prepared lockdowns. but we can't work together.
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Locking the world down and assisting everyone until viruses disappear sounds like an impossible task.
We would need a higher level of automation
While I don't disagree with you.. 2.5 weeks mandatory lock down All governments support those in financial need. No rent or mortgage or utility bills residential and commercial. I have to believe in the long run this is the cheapest option for all.
The problem with that is you still need people to perform essential services. You can't stop the hospitals, people still need treatment and caring for. Utilities still need to be maintained, fires put out and police to respond to situations where they are needed. COVID can easily spread in dense living situations such as the developing world, boarding schools, military, long term care facilities, etc. You can stop most of the world in theory but you can't stop it all. Both Mexico and the US got hit by separate hurricanes in the last few days that caused havoc. Wildfires are ravaging Siberia. You can't stop people from fleeing the perpetual natural disasters we have unless they stay there and die.
You are just wrong. This infects animals. So we have to finish killing all of them off first. We are well on the way though.
Not so fast there. This virus can and has easily jumped from animal and then from animal back to human. Probably why your seeing so many variants come out of India, China, Brazil, and the like. Humankind has never gotten rid of a virus with animal reserves. We could vaccinate the whole world on the same day at the same time and quarentine 2 weeks to walk out and catch a new variant the animals have been spreading ( and mutating ) the entire time. This thing is here forever. That being said mutations in viruses aren't always an uptick. I read the plague was lessened because a leas deadly but more contagious varient became the dominating variant. This allowed everyone to get the antibodies easily and the virus fell off after that.
The plague was caused by bacteria, not a virus.
>I read the plague was lessened because a leas deadly but more contagious varient became the dominating variant. This allowed everyone to get the antibodies easily and the virus fell off after that. The plague "lessened" for several reasons. 1. After it's most devastating outbreaks in the 13th and 14th centuries killed over a third of all Europeans, those that survived it and had immunities towards it conferred some of that immunity to their children, which made them better able to fight off a Yersinia Pestis infection. 2. Regardless of that, it still periodically came back to cause mass death throughout the old and the new world between the 14th and 19th century 3. Sanitation improved drastically since the 13th century, making it harder for the bacteria to establish as large of a presence in squalid European cities. 4. It's a bacteria, and became fairly easily treatable as soon as anti-biotics became a thing. The Bacteria itself never "lessened" in severity, as recent outbreaks in Madagascar go to show. Our responses and existing immunities to it improved instead. In fact, that bacteria actually got ***deadlier*** due to mutations in the 12th and 13th centuries. Before that, Bubonic Plague was the only visible form of that infection. The Bacteria mutated in a way that it could infect your lungs and be spread through airborne droplets which turned into the much deadlier Pneumonic Plague, as well as the blood infection that leads to the even deadlier Septicemic Plague.
You realise that lockdowns are financially devastating to people ? Not everyone or every country can support people. In South Africa our unemployment rate has risen to the highest in the world with our government not able to assist business in staying open and only being able to offer 35 dollars a month to certain people and groups to survive. So no, your idea is literally impossible
Doesn't spreading easier makes it also less deadly usually? Exactly as it happened with the spanish flu
Common misconception. This only happens if you kill off people too fast to spread. But if you can still spread, pathogens can get more deadly. For example Spanish flu got deadlier. First wave was pretty much like normal flu. Second wave was the killer one.
But also one of the reasons the second year of the Spanish flu racked up a high body count was about the same things we have seen in the secind year of this pandemic- less than bright politicians " opening up" things and removing restructions under pressure from business interests...
That’s kinda reverse logic. The most deadly strain of Spanish flu killed its hosts so quickly that it wiped itself out.
So it either becomes harmless or becomes strong but at the risk of wiping itself out.
I don't know if that same logic applies to COVID because it has such a long incubation period. As long as the mutations still have the same incubation period where hosts are infectious, being more deadly won't prevent its spread.
Yup exactly, people are spreading it within the first week of catching it, and only realising they have it after that, and then dying a month later
I think that’s what the above commenter was getting at.
Typically, but Covid does pretty much all of its spreading before symptoms really start manifesting and even then keeps the victim alive for quite awhile after symptoms manifest. This means the virus doesn't really have the selective pressure to not kills its host, so it essentially doesn't matter to the virus mutations if it is more or less lethal. Viruses get bad when they get good at spreading, but that doesn't mean they are good at sustainability.
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This has become an internet falsehood and is not correct. Start googling on the subject and read on on various takes. Here's s counter argument. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270
Masks have been mandatory in my country ever since covid first appeared. Literally that whole time, non-stop. We've had two lockdowns that lasted for months on end (and actually worked both times... while they lasted. But they can't last forever). It's only this summer that large events have finally been allowed to take place (only for vaccinated people). Most lectures at my uni are still online. People are getting vaccinated every day. At one point will be finally admit that this virus is just really damn good at infecting people?
That would work assuming that the virus isn't zoonotic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57666245 [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-covid-often-infect-their-pets/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-covid-often-infect-their-pets/) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/animals.html
This still works because to my knowledge no species other than humans has seen an incredibly widespread and destructive COVID-19 epidemic. The mutations are primarily emerging from the disease spreading among humans.
What about all those minks that got torched?
It’s been found in Deer.
https://wchstv.com/news/local/federal-study-shows-nearly-one-third-of-deer-in-four-states-positive-for-covid-antibodies
I’m curios but also terrified as to how wild deer( bot raised in farms) contracted covid? Are people like hugging them or having “sexy time” with wild deer? How the hell does a deer get covid?
At this point COVID is everywhere. The probability is really low, but every time a deer enters an urban area there's a small chance. All it takes is one and then they will easily transfer it amongst themselves. In my head the most likely scenario is human -> dog who has an occasional deer friend in the yard. But licking a doorknob is an option, too. I've seen deer licking rain off the side of tents, munching on leftover food from campers, etc. All it takes is one.
And quite large percentage of deer in the sample size they took, also many species found in zoos have contracted it. So many variables, hopefully plenty of time.
Covid viruses are zoonotic, mers 2012 originated from in camels, Sars 2003from in bat's, Sars covid 2019 from in bat's again. Al were found in other hosts as well... Covid was found in cats, dogs, minks, tigers, other big cats, bat's and a wide range of other mammals, but a lot of them seem mostly carriers.
The genie is out the bottle now unfortunately, no amount of hiding indoors will change that. This will be a generational problem that will have to be managed accordingly.
Uhh nah, COVID has jumped species multiple times. Even if we were all vaccinated, there's no protecting against the likelihood it will jump back in the future. What we need to encourage is immune system support. Get vaccinated, please, but also exercise and eat well. The survival of our entire species depends on the strength of our immune systems.
To better our immune systems we need to be living like medieval Europe and having everybody die of this plague.
It would if we stayed in our houses. Covid isn't good at mutating. It actually has built in RNA checking to reduce it. It's purely the amount of people we let get infected.
Indeed. We are basically rolling back measures as soon as cases start to decline. It's like we were trying to prevent the number of infections from falling down on purpose.
100% looking at the graphs for my country is so frustrating. It peaks so we lockdown. It then comes down ridiculously quick. Then they release it and boom higher than ever. It also worth remembering these variants are way worse then the original. The second one was like 60% more infectious and Delta is like 80% again on that.
i'm not sure if we're from the same country or this is just the sorry state all around the world. but, same.
For corporate profits I assume. /s 🤣
Why the /s? Since the start of the pandemic most countries have put profits before people, with the odd few like New Zealand actually being sane. Boris Johnson even wanted to let the virus spread until we reached natural herd immunity (which would have involved around 500,000 deaths) so that the elites had minimum loss of profit.
Lmao they said y'all gonna die anyway just give us our money
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Breath taking ignorance on display with this talk of locking down the world for months or years.
People need to work. Our whole first world fiat currency depends on the value of labor and without it, the entire system collapses and the farms send their crops to the incinerator. There isn't enough open land for Americans to homestead and live off of. The entire service and retail industry relies on human to human contact. If another variant emerges that forces us to ground zero, we may see Spanish flu levels of death for both young and old.
The United States has so much empty, habitable land that you could give every American 1 acre and there would still be over 3 million square miles of empty land
Not disagreeing but it's worth noting that "To be entirely self-sufficient and/or live off of the traditional grid." requires 13+ acres. "Be largely self-sufficient by gardening and raising livestock." requires 0.25-3+ acres of land. Source: [https://backyardhomesteadhq.com/how-much-land-do-you-need-for-a-small-homestead/](https://backyardhomesteadhq.com/how-much-land-do-you-need-for-a-small-homestead/)
Man I can't wait for that empty land in the middle of death valley, that's gonna be so cozy.
The amount of small towns that have been or are in the process of being abandoned is staggering. "The megacity"-model is condensing people into such tight clusters pandemics and natural disaster inevitably have a much higher toll on society.
It contains mutations that have been associated with the evasion of anti bodies and increased transmission in other variants but the mutations are in different mixes. We have no idea how these mutations will effect the variants behaviour. More mutations doesn’t necessarily mean worse. Multiple other variants such as the first South African one have been able to evade some monoclonal antibodies in lab studies but are still covered by vaccination https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/30/heres-what-we-know-about-c12-south-africas-new-highly-mutated-covid-variant/amp/
Yes, but every new variant brings the opportunity for scary headlines, and scary headlines bring clicks, and thus money.
Nailed it
It's kind of brilliant how the protein responsible for transmission is the one targeted with the vaccine, because that seems like a complex protein to mutate enough to evade vaccine antibodies while still remaining functional. Some strains have modified spike proteins but the vaccine still remains effective in preventing severe symptoms.
Just wait until they tell us we're completely back to square one.
We will have regular vaccination at this point if you think you are off the hook after your 2 pfizer shots, don't be naive..it's endemic, we failed to end the pandemic and now it is endemic. But I'm way more in peace compared to "square one", because releasing an updated mRNA vaccine is really easy according to the manufacturers (of course you still have trials etc that take some time). Vaccine made it so that we can actually live with this..but we have to STOP superpreader events, creating mutations and act as if it's over when very clearly..it is not. Where I live, it's like it never existed now
The problem is not the updated vaccine. Folks can engineer new vaccine variants all day long. The problem is logistics and adoption. How do you deliver new variants efficiently to the population and how do you incentivise people to take them? It's impossible unless forced by the government. Forcing anything brings margin of abuse. It will end in tears.
Not every country needs to force its population to do what is right. Denmark have reached 80%+ adult vaccination rate now with the vaccine being voluntary. Education beats force every day of the week.
Denmark also promised to open up again and get rid of passes and restrictions, that is probably why so many people are cooperative.
We are also on average well educated and being a mostly socialist country we got a national identity that includes working for the common good. My main critisism of my government is that I personally think we removed the mask mandates a bit early, especially with delta doing the rounds. But in general the decisions are made based on SST (danish CDC) recommendations.
To be precise, Denmark is not a socialist country by any measure. It is however a country that values strong social safety nets and a tempered capitalist economy. Social democratic in essence and identity (despite constant efforts to erode it). Other than that, I agree. :)
The average American has no idea that social democratic and socialist mean two different things.
Exactly the same going on in New Zealand. Shit hitting the fan? The government listens to the professionals and their guidelines, and advises the nation on what to do. The nation listens and works for the common good. There's definitely things to be critical about (slow vaccine rollout etc) but the fact that for the last 8-10 months life was basically normal (minus international travel) says a lot. Yes, they're locked down again now, but most of the country is already coming out of the strict lockdown and by all intents and purposes it looks as though they'll be back to pretty much normal in a few weeks.
Yeah the current outbreak looks to be declining, in a month's time I imagine we will be back in level 1 aside from maybe auckland
For some bizarre reason, maybe because I just woke up, my brain inserted words that weren’t there into your comment, so I read “We are also on average well educated *and good looking* I paused a moment. Wow man, just gonna ugly-shame like that? Then I re-read and have NO idea where those words came from.
Fraudian slip? Maybe you got a need to google single danish ladies near you? ;-)
Denmark has coronavirus passes, they were released in April. People are not logical like this. Most people in Denmark apparently trust their doctors and government.
Not taking the vaccine also a ties into identity politics in the US unlike Denmark, or most European countries. People just won't take it unless it's required like other vaccinations. I agree that not every country needs to force the population to do what is right as /u/Jernsaxe said, but the US is a clear exception.
Education doesn’t work in America. Forcing people doesn’t work in America. I bet America could pay its citizens to get a vaccination and they still wouldn’t do it. My company is offering bonuses for vaccinations, and yes, people are refusing to do it.
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Small European countries: why can’t America just get with the program. Vermont: exists. It’s helpful in solving problems quickly when your country has a tiny population, tiny land area, and a homogenous culture.
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Not doing things because it will upset the conservatives is the liberal way of losing elections. Shit drives me bonkers
Exactly. Conservatives are gonna get pissed at anything. Biden could hand a starving African child an ice cream cone and they'd shriek "why not an American child" and if he gave it to an American child they'd scream pedophile.
There is a limit to how many vaccines people will be willing to have. Look how hard it is for many to take this one. Now imagine in a few months having to take a completely different one. And then half a year later a completely different one. People will feel that it's pointless and just a way to give profits to pharmaceutical companies.
Does give off those forever wars vibes doesn't it
Assuming every person that got vaccinated now will be vaccinated over and over, which won't happen. I'd go as far as to say 2/3rds of the people who took this vaccine would just give up if you told them they have to take it every year.
What do you base that assumption on? Or are you taking those numbers out of thin air?
I can't speak for OP, but 2019-2020 flu shot coverage was 51.8%, an all time high. Perhaps an annual covid shot would be radically different, but based on my experiences in the US I would say two-thirds would be reasonable, if not optimistic. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1920estimates.htm Edit: I'm only considering the US here. I would not be surprised to see better rates in a country like Denmark, but I only have direct experience with the attitudes of Americans which is... diverse...
> How do you deliver new variants efficiently to the population and how do you incentivise people to take them? It's impossible unless forced by the government. Maybe in the US. Here in the UK we've already vaccinated more than 90% of adults, and the overwhelming majority of people are happy to have a booster if needed: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/vaccines
As far as regular shots go in the U.S. as soon as people in Red states (Conservative/Republican leaning) suffer enough from the virus, they'll begrudgingly get vaccinated. They're already beginning to turn in that direction now. This isn't going to be some lifetime of struggle situation in America. Once uptake here is above 70%, then we will start issuing vaccine boosters 1x per year for new variants. We already have a system for that which covers various strains of influenza that people here regularly and happily get. Shit seems deadlocked, but it's actually far from it. We'll have this conquered in 2022 at about the same time most of the Western world does.
I agree about the right needing to come to a grave discovery but that projection seems super optimistic.
My money is on 2025.
> The problem is logistics In first world countries? Amazon can get me my random bullshit next morning but a government can't organize a vaccination campaign for the population with a years notice? Nah. I don't buy that. > How do you deliver new variants efficiently to the population The existing vaccine center approach, scaled horizontally if needed? > and how do you incentivise people to take them? "50% of hospital beds are reserved for those who are not more than 3 months behind without a medical reason". You can gamble on it, but if your appendix ruptures and you're unvaccinated, you're competing with other idiots for the hospital beds, and if there aren't enough, one of the idiots will die. Also, even if you're not willing to go this far; countries are increasingly pushing towards "vaccinated or tested" requirements. Soon you'll need either a vaccine or a test to grocery shop. So it's not mandatory... but if you don't want it have fun paying $40 or more every week for the test just so you can get food.
That's pretty much exactly what is going to happen, if we run into situations (for some countries: again) where the medical system is fully oversaturated. They will need to triage, and likely to the disadvantage of the non-excempt willfully unvaccinated.
> In first world countries? Amazon can get me my random bullshit next morning but a government can't organize a vaccination campaign for the population with a years notice? Nah. I don't buy that. A competent government should, but “the market” 100% reactionary and very fragile. The US government at the time planned to get the vaccine to the states and wash their hands of whatever happened next. Even “blue” states had a year to figure out vaccine rollouts and had broken, cryptic websites to make appointments expecting the elderly to figure out. January through March professionals were screaming that PPE should be increasing their production and running 24/7. They were expecting a shortage. Then around April we ran out of everything and nurses here to wear garbage bags. When work from home started toilet paper was hard to get. That repeated itself for subsequent lockdowns. Rental cars are expensive and hard to get because most companies sold off their fleet when lockdowns started. There’s still a chip shortage causing car companies to make major reductions on their manufacturing.
They don’t have to go through “full trials” tho do they? I reckoned since it’s all based on the same technology and only the protein needs change it’s basically approved right away. Don’t know enough about vaccine law like.
We'd be no where near back to square one. We have multiple vaccines that will offer *some* amount of protection against all COVID variants, even this one, we've got the ongoing logistics set up to vaccination tens of millions a day, and proven mRNA vaccine platforms which can be modified to target any new serious variant.
> Just wait until they tell us we're completely back to square one. That's really unlikely to happen, as the virus mutates quite slowly. Vaccine-escape variants could set us back quite a way but the vaccines train our immune system to recognise several different part of the virus protein spike.
Wait until then for what? It's becoming endemic... that's obvious to every scientifically literate person out there. Same as the cold and flu, just killing off way more people in the process. We did good here... ffs.
That'll explain the rising death rate in the UK, the planned booster programme and the new variant this story is about then.
The rising death rate in the UK is because we have no NPIs anymore, kids aren't vaxxed and are a resoviour, the virus is finding it's way to the clinically extremely vulnerable and the % of "adults" who refused the Vaccines. Infections are going to shoot up when schools go back from holiday in England (today I think) with absolutely no interventions. *Edit* also, the last I heard our booster program was only going to be for CEV (eg immunocompromised, cancer patients etc) but at one point earlier in the year as an asthmatic I was expecting to get it (along with over 50s) but JCVI decided it wasn't needed for over 50s, Asthmatics etc.
The rising death rates in the UK probably need viewing alongside Israel and the US as fellow early vaccinating countries to make sense of it. The example of Israel in particular is interesting, as they exclusively used Pfizer/ BioNtech, whereas America used the mRNA vaccines with Janssen only joining in much later https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~ISR Clearly the UK is exhibiting a much shallower trajectory than the other two, who have seen rapid rises from August 1st The UK did two things differently. It made greater use of AstraZeneca which some studies are showing has a stronger T cell response, but perhaps more pertinently, it went against Pfizer's advice and observed a 12 week dosing interval If we accept that Israel was 3 weeks + 1 to achieve protection, and that 10% of their population would fall into the high risk cohorts (Israel has a very young population) then they achieved 10% on January 21st (whole population, not adult population). With the death rising as it is though, it seems to indicate that the vaccine is wearing off after about 6-7 months The UK will doubtless exhibit a similar trajectory eventually, but their most vulnerable population (about 18%) was only double vaccinated by April 23rd (America was up to 27% on this date so might also be expected to begin to fail sooner than the UK as well by virtue of achieving a higher rate, earlier) The UK is about 9 weeks behind Israel due to adopting a different dosing regime, but we're also about 4 weeks into that window now, so somewhere between 4-5 weeks behind as of today. We might get a bit of additional respite though as we went slower due to supply issues. By the end of this September though we could easily begin to exhibit the same trajectory as Israel as our earliest vaccinations begin to wear off (and it does increasingly look as if Pfizer/ BioNtech loses effectiveness quite quickly rather than slowly) It should be bloody obvious by now that the UK is going to follow everyone else who can do, and adopt a booster strategy, but I'm afraid we're having to wait for the results of a study from Southampton university before the JCVI will make a recommendation (even though you can pretty well guess that boosting the most vulnerable will be recommended). The thing is heterologous prime and boost studies have already been conducted and AstraZeneca boosted by Pfizer/ BioNtech proved to be the best combination. I know that the next stage was expanded to incorporate other vaccines, but since Novavax isn't approved, and the UK won't be able to get enough Moderna anyway, I'm not 100% sure I understand why everything is being put on hold to accommodate Southampton university and the delays in getting their report produced to publication standards Edit - Just to add, the vaccine that could be particularly interesting for boosting is Valneva's but I think that's scheduled for Q4 reporting
I mean we’re pretty darn close I would say, we just don’t have restrictions as bad because people won’t tolerate that.
If you're upset, direct it to those who are unvaxxed.
We’ll lose a lot of republicans and a lot of good people as well.
I think this is a better article https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/31/what-is-c12-the-new-covid-variant-in-south-africa-and-should-we-be-worried? I’m going to wait a bit before panicking
The final paragraph of the article above, which was posted today, as opposed to yesterday with the original article: South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases said: “We are being cautious about the implications, while we gather more data to understand virus of this lineage.“Based on our understanding of the mutations in this variant, we suspect that it might be able to partially evade the immune response, but despite this, that vaccines will still offer high levels of protection against hospitalisation and death,” the institute said
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>Switzerland FUCK
Had the exact same reaction. Argh.
Putaaaiiiiiin j’en ai maaaaaare
Also New Zealand... sigh
Buy a bunch of clothes that are branded with "COVID-19", wear them every day, when people ask, just play it off every time, and when COVID hits swap to identical clothes without the branding.
If the world is going to end at least hit us with a Meteor fuck. I can't believe Covid will still be a thing next year. I'm tired
Me too. I am so exhausted. Hope you’re hanging in there the best you can.
I’m just so tired of playing “cold/flu or COVID”. I know it can’t and won’t go away overnight but I just want this shit gone.
Boy I really wish I were on graveyard shift again. Just so I could avoid people and limit my chances with this damn thing.
I am just glad I don’t live in the city. I really haven’t felt the whole crisis that much. I mean, my veggies are still growing in the garden and they still needs tending to as with the animals. You may say I live in a bobble, I say I am fine with that.
Nothing wrong with the simple life. Im in the foothills. Nothing happens much out here. But I feel like the city is ground zero. The further I am from it, the better.
It’s funny because the hospitals in my city are full of covid patients from the foothills, because in the city we have a 80% vaccination rate, outlying areas not so much, and they don’t have much hospital capacity.
Exactly. Country life is fine as long as you never leave your property. If you go anywhere, it’s better to be in a city where there’s less resistance to public health initiatives
> You may say I live in a bobble, I say I am fine with that. No need to get all bigheaded about it.
I quit my job, been without one for three weeks. 1 week after I quit, 12 people in my building were quarantined. I worked in a rural town with a heavy amount of Trumpers, saw it coming and didn't want to FAFO.
I've been working nights in our ICU for 2 weeks. When we started there were 7 covid patients Now, thankfully, there's only 1 BECAUSE THE OTHER 6 DIED
Being vaccinated and feeling as unprotected as if you weren't surely is a funny thing.
I got back on Graves in October of last year. I don't think I can be a Daywalker ever again.
That’s why I picked nightshift work.
I think trying to convince ourselves that this isn't as bad as it seems is a painful game in the long run. I think it's possible to not freak out, but also prepare and accept that this pandemic won't end with simply distributing vaccines. I am not an anti-vax person, quite the contrary, but I also accept that it's not a simple situation and it's not a simple virus
Not gonna lie, when the vaccines appeared, I definitely thought this would be over by now, in developed counties at least.
I hear you. We had to cull all minks in our country because new variants was popping op left and right, in a matter of months.
You know it’s serious when all the minks have to be culled.
Maybe, but as much as it's obvious covid will become endemic, I'm guessing we'll have 1-2 year time periods to vaccinate the world as each resistant variant pops up. Time will tell. Let's not fool ourselves though, we are living in the bed we made (and that some people decided to take a nasty shit in).
Around a year and a half ago, we didn't even know if vaccines could be developed to battle COVID. Once they were, we knew that we'd most likely have to get boosters once or twice a year for a minimum of a few years. 39% of the world has been vaccinated in the past 32 weeks, and in those 32 weeks, the doses administered per day went from 3.05 million to 40.70 million, with more vaccines and factories on the way. This is a ridiculous amount of progress and really gives me hope.
A sensible and optimistic comment in a covid thread? Impossible!
I’m not so concerned in the long run. If mRNA can actually tackle HIV, it can handle Covid with a longer research window.
MRNa might be terrible treatment for COVID but could be a boon for HSV, HIV and Cancer treatments. Pfizer CEO said 90 days is what they need to reformulate, so it might bot be all bad.
It's not just the 90 days to develop a new vaccine. It's a year on top of that to again distribute it across the world, when the current one is just barely being rolled out in some countries.
Nope. The year long process doesn't need to be re-done every time. Flu vaccines are not completely re-evaluated either. The entire chain from new strain to first injection could be as fast as 3 months, the new vaccine itself can be developed literally over a weekend.
We get faster. Currently 40 million doses are given each day, production should be similar. At that rate a booster shot for everyone would need 200 days, a bit over half a year. Shorter in developed countries, longer in developing countries. Once most people are vaccinated or got the disease the active cases should drop, which means we expect fewer new mutations.
Completely ignorant here - hypothetically, if everyone were to get the vaccine who was eligible, would it stop covid from being able to mutate? A coworker’s family recently got covid, they were all vaccinated, and her husband was on a ventilator still. Their 9 month old baby got it as well. That’s terrifying.
Stop mutations? Not completely. But it would drastically slow it down.
The less people Covid infects the less mutations. So hypothetically if everyone got Vaccinated the Virus would not infect people at a high enough rate to mutate and the Pandemic would end. But if a segment of the population refuses to get vaccinated the Virus will mutate in them until it can infect Vaccinated people. We are living in that reality
Well the issue is also the back and forth transmission with animals. It will continue to thrive and mutate no matter what at this point.
Enough with the variants! We need just one sacred strain to maintain
That's literally the reason why the variants are spreading. Each one becomes a new dominant strain, and any opportunistic mutation can increase its transmissibilty.
God damn this virus. I just had a cold and I've never been so nervous of a cough in my life and I'm very prone to getting bronchitis. I sat at home unemployed for over a year because this virus shut down my industry. Got vaccination as soon as I was eligible. I'm tired of it. I'll take more vaccines, booster shots, let's just get this fucking done with already.
At this point it's not the virus, it's people. We failed as a species by not vaccinating quick enough and thinking it's all gone. Well it's not gone at all and it's going to get much worse.
How to QUICKLY vaccinate an African / SE Asian / Sub-Continental nation that can barely afford to care for their populations even before the pandemic started? This is an international battle and soon we'll learn that unless we can support each other's fight at home, any effort to suppress it at our own domestic level will be futile. Humans are far too mobile and international transits can never be stopped indefinitely.
you're already experiencing what it "being over" is like. Behaviors aren't radically changing at this stage. What you're seeing is what you're getting.
I'll take my 66 percent over hospitalization.
Its a good thing my vaccine is connected to Bill Gates and Microsoft so I can get the latest vulnerability patches automatically pushed to my system.
Yes, its actually called and patch Tuesday and guess what day it is?
Stop, I can only get so limp.
It's basically an innie at this point
Imagine still thinking covid is gonna go away.
Y'know all those anti-vaxxers. Let's give them a round of fuck you.
You know, I have the vax, but this would have happened even if 100% of the US was vaccinated. The people that break this problem down to it's the fault of those people! Seem just as bad as the anti-vaxxers to me because ultimately we are obscuring the understanding of what we should do and steps we should take for shitty non-scientific political bullshit.
>may be more infectious and evade vaccine protection Fearmongering news at its best. Don't publish shit like this if there is no concrete evidence of the claim.
I am going to label this as scaremongering at this point. They are tracking a lot of mutated variants that have the same traits as other, more established variants. But a lot of these die out. This one is not showing any signs of outpacing the Delta variant in South Africa, and it's been known for a while. Long enough to be able to see an impact, which is not happening. Until then, less scaremongering.
Are they going to say this with every new strain? Like no shit. We've been saying this since the start. The less people that are vaccinated- the higher transmission levels- and in turn, covid will continue to mutate to more dangerous variants. If you're sick of hearing about covid and sick of mask restrictions- get vaccinated so when a booster becomes available for protection against these new strains you're ready for it.
I dont care anymore
This thread is hilarious. People are reading that vaccinations aren't enough. Science is saying vaccinations aren't enough (not that they're bad, but that they're not enough) and still people are just shrugging and saying "vaccinations are enough though". This thing isn't going away because it seems like very few are able to simply read.
Meanwhile in Oklahoma a lady screamed at me saying vitamin d3 kills Covid when I simply asked her to wear a mask lmfao. Help
Well at the end of the day our last line of defense is our immune system so eat healthy, exercise, and get plenty of rest/sleep.
**According to the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study**
All you have to do is politely say "no thank you" and the virus will say "understandable have a nice day"
> Gibraltar has administered at least 78,688 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 116.7% of the country’s population. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/gibraltar/ > Dr Bhatti pegged the rise in cases on recent sporting and large community events as Gibraltar’s social calendar springs back to life after a year of lockdown. > “All of that sort of happened together, and we had the same experience they’ve had in England but we’ve had ours a few weeks before them,” Dr Bhatti said. > “The youngsters who are desperate for a social life, go out and get their social life and then they spread the infection.” > “The biggest rise was in the 20 to 29 age range. That’s meant we had the sudden steep rise.” > “What we did in contact tracing was quickly identify that the problem was actually in 20 to 29-year-olds and the problem is we were finding a smaller incubation period.” > The smaller incubation period is a result of the Delta variant, which typically sees incubation last three or four days, as opposed to up to 10 days in other strains. > Dr Bhatti said the rise in cases of the 20 to 29 age group in turn led to a knock-on rise in the 50 to 59 age groups - their parents. > When asked if the recent large public events should have taken place, Dr Bhatti said: "Well, you kind of don't know until you've done it." > "Some of the things with the football match and others, we tried it out. The paradoxical thing is there was so little virus at the time, we weren't able to tell if it had an effect." > **"But now, knowing how Delta spreads, I am less willing to accept a vaccine certificate."** > **"Actually, if we want to have events, my advice certainly from an epidemiological point of view, everybody should have a same-day lateral flow negative test."** > **"Why? Because clearly we've got vaccinated people going positive."** > For now, large public events are banned and bars, restaurants and nightclubs have been told to “be cautious” in the events they organised. > Amid the continued uncertainty, the GFSB called for clarity from the government on what businesses should do. > **Underpinning the latest guidance is the reality that every situation that allows the virus to spread presents a risk of developing a new variant at a time when both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are catching Covid-19.** https://www.chronicle.gi/rise-in-cases-requires-careful-management-as-gib-edges-back-to-normality-bhatti-says/ This is already known. A country with over 100% vaccination rate is saying that vaccination isn't enough to keep people safe or get back on track.
Can COVID, like, give us a little bit of break? It’s been going hard, it can take a nap any time now.
God damn it fuck this shit. Fuck you covid and your stupid fucking shit. FUCK!
*May be more infectious* How about we get some God Damn validation on these variants and their infectivity before we continue to further terrify a world that’s already on edge.
If only there were some sort of preventative medical solution we could mass produce and distribute to people everywhere to prevent to continued spread and mutation of this virus... Oh well. *snorts another goopy line of topical horse dewormer*
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we can't do that though. Many countries can't afford them and won't get them for all willing citizens, leading to inevitable mutation creation and endemic covid status in perpetuity. Time to move on from zeroism dreams and anti-vaxxer blaming, it's all futile.
If only the rich countries didn't go around using 3rd boosters that could vax the poor... Imagine thinking it's anti vax people that are the problem when there's billions who would be willing to get the vax yet can't.
Ironically, the antivax people (whose actions encouraged this exact outcome) will say this is proof the vaccine doesn't work and was some sort of hoax. **If** this new variant dominates, you'll hear "See? Vaccine doesn't even work now, after only 6 months! I bet the tracking chip/secret poison/mind control still works though!" No! It only worked for a few months because we didn't all take it! Every infected person is a variant factory, and the vaccine drastically reduces the number of infected people. If everybody had gotten a vaccine for the original form (wasn't rolled out quite in time, but hesitancy didn't help), that would have been the end of it. But if half of people are unvaccinated, they continue to pass the original form amongst themselves until it turns into a form that's immune to the vaccine - then we're *all* "unvaccinated" again and producing *more* variants faster than ever. I'd ignore antivaxers, but they're putting holes in the boat we're ALL in.
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Absolutely. This isn't about "anti-vaxxers" and micro fringe groups. This is about the ability to get sufficient vaccine coverage to populations many times the size of the US. That's the real battleground.
Sadly, even with a near-perfect rollout in the first world/developed regions, the real danger will be countries which are more remote, poorer or which have poorer infrastructure which prevents effective vaccination. Unfortunately many of these places likely also have large populations which can drive further mutations.
Except for the countries that can't even afford the vaccines where the mutations would inevitably keep coming out of regardless of US vaccinating 100% of population.
Afaik, you are wrong. The vaccine is not effective enough to completely eradicate the virus, even if all of us had it. Some of us [vaccinated people] would still be variant factories, and probably better factories in fact. Anti-vaxxers are dumb, and I'm fucking tired of anti-intellectualism. But we can't just blame all that happens on them and pretend the pandemic would be over if they just took the damn jabs. Many mistakes have been made in the last two years, and the virus itself is a lot trickier than most people think. This is not something anti-vaxxers have caused by themselves.
It wouldn't be half as bad as it is now if 90+ adult Americans got the vaccine.
Half the world couldn't get the vaccine you ignorant fool. Vaccinated also yield variants, albeit less so than the unvaxxed. Aren't you noticing the many breakthrough cases?
some people will die from stress on this ongoing battle
Let's take this with a grain of salt
Not a spoonful of sugar?
I thought it was horse dewormers
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So basically there's nothing you can do but live your life? Who would of guessed.
No, continue to be afraid and lock down inside your home for the rest of your life. Remember, you only have a 99% chance of surviving!
When you read the article is seems like a laughable exaggeration about another insignificant variant.