Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lbeltrame 2260 days ago
Vaccines might not work. There are four at this point being studied in humans (everything else is preclinical), with three of them just in phase 1, that means testing safety, and not yet efficacy. We don't yet know whether they will work, or if the immunity will last long enough.

We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs.

1 comments

> Vaccines might not work.

That's not the point I am making. The only solution to virus spreading is immunity. It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves. This virus falls within a virus category.

Should the population not be immune to the virus, the flare ups will occur.

> We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs

That's managing flare ups. Look at measles in non-vaccinated pockets of NYS:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measl...

The immunity rate (mostly via vaccination) for measles in the US is over 91%. The immunity rate for COVID-19 in the US would be a percentage of people who were infected since there's no vaccine.

> It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves

It is unclear whether Covid-19 confers SARS-CoV-2 immunity. There are conflicting data, with some for future immunity out of China and Germany and some against out of Korea [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/coronavir...