[Jeema101]

This article brings up something I was thinking about when this all first started: cross-immunity with other coronaviruses and whether or not infection with one of them could at least give partial immunity to SARS-CoV-2. As the study points out, there are less harmful human coronaviruses which are thought to cause around 15% of common colds worldwide.

I wonder if anybody has thought to research using these viruses as part of an innoculation strategy at least for high-risk groups. After all the first 'vaccine' ever developed in the 18th century (really an innoculation) was to intentionally give people cowpox in order to give them immunity to smallpox.

Maybe it's too risky though for some reason? I dunno.

[makomk]

The existing human coronaviruses aren't the most well-researched things around, but as I understand it there's evidence infection with them might actually be pretty dangerous to at-risk people. They just can't cause a pandemic because too many people are immune.

[eloff]

The common cold is dangerous to people? The flu, sure, but I never heard of people dying from a cold. I'm sure it happens, but in comparable numbers though? I don't think so.

[ejstronge]

You may already know this, but for the sake of others, it’s important to realize that many viruses cause what we refer to as ‘common cold’. Coronaviruses are only a minor component of this set of viruses, as low as 1-2% in a study I read (can’t find it now; this value also depends on lots of factors).

[pbhjpbhj]

FWIW this WebMD article I read a while back puts "colds" as being caused by Coronavirus 20% of the time, https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca....

[watwut]

This migth depend on location and local climate. The typical cold in my country has different symptoms and length then typical cold 8 hours of drive away south.

[eloff]

I had heard 1/4 of the common cold are Coronaviruses. Thanks for clarifying here though. I tend to be very short on HN for practical purposes.

[ejstronge]

Too late to edit my comment, but a somewhat authoritative source claims 10-15% of colds are caused by coronaviruses (UpToDate, if you're curious). The study I read may have been referring to a specific coronavirus that was mentioned in the original post.

[guscost]

It happens all the time, in exactly the same sense that people are dying “from” COVID-19 (i.e. usually combined with other morbidities). How much of this pandemic is due to the disease actually being worse than other coronavirus diseases, and how much is simply due to the rapid spread/no pre-existing immunity, remains to be seen.

Who else here remembers learning that AIDS patients (people with acquired immunodeficiency) can die from the common cold, in school? Is it not common knowledge that old folks can die from a cold, too?

[ummonk]

Covid-19 is killing healthy young people with no known pre-existing conditions at very high rates. It just happens to be killing the elderly and those with comorbidites (which includes normal ailments like diabetes and obesity) at even higher rates.

It isn’t just some new common cold that we don’t have herd immunity for. Different viruses have different lethality; common cold corona viruses are far milder than SARS-Ncov-2 which is in turn far milder than MERS.

[redis_mlc]

Is it corona virus, or ventilators, killing them?

When you have a mortality rate of 66% to 90% for something tha isn't a hemorrhagic fever, it's the ventilator.

[javagram]

People were dying without ventilators in Wuhan and elsewhere. (E.g. all the people in NYC who are dying at home, something like 100 a day last I saw)

The ventilator from what people are saying doesn’t seem to help as much as was hoped, but it’s not like hospitals are killing the patients by putting them on a vent, which is what your comment seems to imply?

[DanBC]

People dying in care and nursing homes are not on ventilators. This may be a significant number of covid-19 deaths.

https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-co...

> Key findings:

> Official data on the numbers of people affected by COVID-19 is not available in many countries

> Due to differences in testing availabilities and policies, and to different approaches to recording deaths, international comparisons are difficult

> Data from 3 epidemiological studies in the United States show that as many as half of people with COVID-19 infections in care homes were asymptomatic (or pre-symptomatic) at the time of testing

> Data from 5 European countries suggest that care home residents have so far accounted for between 42% and 57% of all deaths related to COVID-19.

[ummonk]

While there is speculation that ventilators might be worsening the situation, it's ridiculous to suggest that 66-90% of people with ARDS might die, with or without a ventilator. There are other ways to die from a viral lung infection than just hemorrhagic fever.

[eloff]

I disagree. I'm unable to find any source with numbers. At best I've seen the statement "it's rarely fatal except in very rare circumstances".

Like the flu, you don't die from the flu, but really it's the last straw on top of other issues that pushes people over the edge.

But the flu is far more deadly than the common cold, it's misleading to talk about them together like that.

[guscost]

There are no numbers. Nobody has ever bothered to measure it separately from pneumonia. It’s hardly ever tested for or listed under cause of death, even when it’s obviously a factor. Once things change in the aftermath of all of this, we will see if your instinct is correct.

[guscost]

Well it turns out I'm wrong about this, there are some studies with numbers but they're pretty rare:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3655081/

> Twenty-two percent of all subjects with isolated coronavirus were hospitalized, but in the population aged ≥60 years this increased to 73%. While our study design precludes the determination of exact hospitalization rates as a result of coronavirus infections, the hospitalization rates were similar to those for influenza.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181476/

> The high proportion of non-influenza infection in this study (72%) underscores the importance of non-influenza viral infection in contributing to severe illness necessitating hospital and ICU admission in adults, as has been found by others.

[ceejayoz]

Certainly not the same mortality rate, but the common cold does kill people every year due to pneumonia, asthma attacks, etc.

[ummonk]

Maybe we could give them to people who aren’t at-risk though, so they are more likely to fight off covid -19 and less likely to transmit it around.

[_ea1k]

Its been thought of, but I think these kinds of things aren't considered acceptable today. I do wonder if there is some variant of Coronavirus that has been in circulation for a while that causes some immunity, though. There are some strange things in the data, IMO, but there are lots of other possible explanations too.

[ummonk]

Yeah I’ve been asking about this for a while with no good answers. Why aren’t we looking into whether it would be helpful to enable every healthy person to get the Coronavirus common cold to help boost herd immunity?

[redis_mlc]

Normally modern medicine doesn't make people sick deliberately, because some percentage will always have some time of reaction. And the US is also a litigious society.

However, I'm in favor of ending lockdown and letting corona virus run its course, just like the flu every year. That's the fastest way to get herd immunity.

[ummonk]

Yeah, but letting it run its course kills off at least 1% of the population and causes potentially long term lung damage for a sizable portion of the rest of the population.

[solarkraft]

You might be interested in this discussion about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22830320