[duxup]

>the virus can be contained without such a large loss of life?

Generally speaking:

But then you have to keep containing it right?

There's not a magical end of containing unless the virus just goes away / a vaccine is available ... that doesn't seem to be a thing yet.

I'm not all for just letting the chips fall where they may, but success at preventing exposure to your population vs heard immunity means the folks who haven't been exposed have to keep avoiding it.

[toast0]

> But then you have to keep containing it right?

If you don't have herd immunity, then you need to be continually surveilling for it, and when it's present, switch to containment.

Containment is easier when the number of cases is small though. If you get a handful of cases, contact trace and make general advisory news releases. If you get more than 20 cases, ask people to wear masks. If it gets worse, then you have to take bigger steps.

[intotheabyss]

A lot of assumptions here. Immunity may not even be long lasting. I live in a country where we've largely stopped community transmission, and now we can open back up with masks for all to keep it that way until we all get vaccinated next year.

America's strategy (or lack thereof) is simply negligence.

[__blockcipher__]

Please stop repeating the “there might not be long term immunity” meme. It is unfounded and contradicts decades of established immunological principles.

Memory T-Cell reactivity to SARS-1 has been shown to persist across decades. The latest study showed strong activity after 17+ years.

SARS-2 is incredibly structurally similar to SARS-1.

Even if we pretend t-cells don’t exist, immunological memory is a thing. Once circulating antibodies have completely faded after months, there still remain memory b cells which persist across decades and will ramp up antibody production all over again when exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Therefore the subsequent infection is addressed more quickly and more powerfully, leading to lower peak viral load and therefore theoretically lowered transmissibility and vastly improved individual outcomes.

So if we pretend half the immune system doesn’t exist, then you can get reinfected months later but you will spread way less and not be at any significant personal risk of bad outcome.

Herd immunity works. It’s a natural phenomenon that has been unjustifiably demonized.

[raphlinus]

If herd immunity works, then what is your explanation for the fact that alpha and beta coronaviruses such as 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1 (responsible for many occurrences of the common cold) are in continuous circulation?

[__blockcipher__]

Great question. Reaching herd immunity does not cause a virus to stop circulating. It just stops it from spreading exponentially. That’s a common misconception.

What you are referring to is eradication, which has only ever been performed twice. SARS-2 is functionally impossible to eradicate due to its zoonotic origin and incredible spread.

Even with herd immunity SARS-2 is here to stay. That’s not a problem though, even if we could so something about it. Why? Because SARS-2 kills the very old but spares the very young. Therefore once it has passed through the current population, the set of SARS-CoV-2-naive individuals becomes dominated by new entrants to the world, meaning babies/toddlers, the same group that does not die to COVID-19 in any real numbers. Therefore unlike Influenza, recurring deaths from COVID-19 will be incredibly low in subsequent years.

[raphlinus]

As long as we're tossing around citations to the scientific literature which supposedly support our arguments, here's one I'm sure you will enjoy: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v...

[__blockcipher__]

See, they use general human coronaviruses as a model, instead of SARS-1, which is incredibly functionally and structurally similar to SARS-2.

Why would you willfully ignore the enormous research literature showing enduring immunity developing from SARS-1? Oh, right, because either you haven't read it or you don't like that it doesn't support your conclusions.

It's like, imagine we're discussing H1N1 reinfection, and we have a highly similar H1N0 which varies very slightly, and we know that doesn't lead to reinfection. But instead you look at a number of Influenza viruses in the same family but not nearly as similar.

Don't you see how ridiculous that is?

We obviously should use SARS-1 as a model for SARS-2.

[intotheabyss]

I never said anything about herd immunity, all I've said is that immunity may not be long lasting.

Basing an entire countries policies around a supposition that herd immunity is practical is, in my opinion, negligence. It's only practical for diseases that don't kill 0.5-1% of the infected population.

It's been proven that lockdowns and slow reopenings work to limit spread, followed by contact tracing clusters to prevent reemergence until community vaccination programs.

Americans are just bitter that their governments are totally inept.

[__blockcipher__]

2.8 million people die in the US every year. That's 1% of the actual population.

What is it about SARS-2 that makes it so that a few hundred thousand dead is impractical and negligent?

(BTW, the hidden argument of yours here is that we can successfully avoid that mortality by practicing containment which I dispute)

[intotheabyss]

Well I live in a country where we've contained the virus and far less than 0.25% of the population has contracted it, so you're just wrong. Maybe America can't contain, but they are the outlier in this pandemic due to their poor leadership and negligence.

[__blockcipher__]

Okay, but now your country can't let anyone into it without 2+ weeks quarantine. Similarly you need to be ready to "lockdown" (or whatever policy your country used) at any given moment if there's a flare-up.

Practicing containment is like leaving a forest full of extremely dry brush. It works great until the fire starts.

[duxup]

I duno man the 'immunity may not even be long lasting' could be true but bringing that up seems like a weird sort of pseudo assumption too...

[intotheabyss]

No, it's a matter of assessing risk. Why would you risk infecting your entire population with a novel virus that kills on the order of 1% of all infected, when you can do shutdowns and perform slow reopenings to limit spread below 5% of the population until vaccination?

We should be assuming that immunity doens't last long and basing all policies on that assumption until proven otherwise.

[duxup]

I think you're pretty far off from what I was talking.

I wasn't encouraging infecting everyone intentionally.

I was noting the ongoing scale of effort required to protect everyone you keep a large % of the population unexposed.

>We should be assuming that immunity doens't last long and basing all policies on that assumption until proven otherwise.

I don't think that assumption makes sense at all with modern medical science.