[pmoriarty]

I've heard an epidemiologist say that if a vaccine becomes available in 18 months it'll be a record.

Experimental treatments are being researched, but with only very small numbers of patients. It'll take quite some time for those treatments to become widely available.

It's unlikely that we're going to even begin to see things return to normal in a month or even three of isolation, especially if that isolation isn't as effectively and universally enforced as in China.

Afterwards there has to be extremely aggressive testing, tracking, and monitoring, or the outbreak has a very good chance of starting all over again.

In addition, the health care system itself has to have time to recover and replenish its equipment, ICU capacity, and healthy and able medical personnel.

[scottlocklin]

> I've heard an epidemiologist say that if a vaccine becomes available in 18 months it'll be a record.

Your epidemiologist should talk to a chemist or look at a wikipedia entry. In 1957, the H2N2 pandemic vaccine was available in 3 months. Still managed to kill a few million people.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/security/ops/hsc-scen-3_pande...

https://www.city-journal.org/1957-asian-flu-pandemic

[etrabroline]

I think you are nitpicking this doctor's words instead of listening to what he's saying. 18 years and no SARS vaccine. 18 months for SARS 2 would be miraculous.

[scottlocklin]

He's an epidemiologist, and I think people aren't listening to what history is saying about the possibility of things. People accept 18 years or 18 months because they're trained to live in a sclerotic bureaucratic hellscape not because those are actual limitations involving long periods of time.

There was a thread last night about people worrying that improvised ventilators aren't FDA tested or whatever. That's a great thing to worry about in soft times. If I (or a member of my family) am facing death while waiting for a ventilator to save my life, I'll take my chances on the doodad cobbled together from a CPAP machine without FDA approval. Same story with vaccinations.