[loveistheanswer]

It almost seems like a lot of people don't want the data to indicate that natural immunity is strong and long lasting, even though the data shows that reinfection is extemely rare.

Similar to how so many people have been unwilling to even consider a lab leak was a possibility, until just now it seems, because that idea was heresy to the orthodox dogma that ordained Scientists are Saviors.

Humans have equated sickness with Sin for thousands of years, and catching covid has been no exception.

[dmlittle]

I’m not sure if all natural immunities are stronger, or even strong. I’m not denying those exists but I also personally know 3 people that have gotten COVID-19 twice.

If natural immunity only protects against a particular strain and the vaccine against a group of them I think that’s still a solid reason to continue pushing for people to get vaccinated.

[Scoundreller]

The vaccines (so far) all use sequences of the spike protein from an early sample of COVID-19. They just make spike proteins and your body sees it and becomes immune to it. They've made some modifications, but for better stability/structure outside of the virus, but not (yet) to address variants.

If anything, infection from current circulating virus is more relevantly effective (but obviously more dangerous than the vaccines).

What I wonder is how much post-infection immunity might be from something other than just the spike protein, and therefore a bit more flexible against new variants than our strictly 'detect the spike protein' vaccination programmes.

And how 'flexible' immunity is from infection vs. vaccination.

[__blockcipher__]

Yes exactly this. Naturalistic immunity learns a more diverse set of epitopes. Whereas the artificial-spike-protein immunity is learning just the S protein. The spike is super important but it’s not the only source of epitopes. And I’ve seen some papers on immunology of SARS-2 that do show a lot of activity that’s not based around the spike protein.

This notion that natural immunity is “worse” or won’t be able to handle the “variants” is completely contrary to the evidence as well as just basic napkin immunology. It’s, IMO, purely an idea spread implicitly through media headlines with the obvious intent of convincing people who don’t benefit from the vaccine (those who have already recovered successfully from COVID-19) to get it. I’ve talked to multiple friends in real life who had PCR-confirmed COVID/19, recovered, and got the vaccine anyway (which of course had even worse side effects than the usual second shot syndrome since the immune system had already been sensitized to SARS-2), and upon my prodding they basically all seemed to think they needed the vaccine to be protected against “the variants”.

[anonymouse008]

Aye, I’d much rather fight the bull head on than play matador

[logicchains]

>The vaccines (so far) all use sequences of the spike protein from an early sample of COVID-19.

This is not true of Sinovac, which is a "good-old-fashioned" vaccine and provides exposure to the full (dead) virus.

[logicchains]

For influenza it's been found that natural immunity provides better protection against future variants than vaccination https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/

[ultralite]

Natural immunity was used as a justification for some societal responses, particularly by some on one side of the political spectrum.

Thus, some of those on the opposite side will interpret strong natural immunity to COVID-19 as a political loss.

[qqqwerty]

I think the 3.5 million deaths were used as justification for certain societal responses. But if you like attacking straw men, who am I to stop you. It is a free country after all!

[ultralite]

I expect it works both ways: I expect a weak natural immunity to COVID-19 would have been considered a political loss to some.

I don't have sufficient expertise on the matter to hold strong positions either way.

[qqqwerty]

As far as I am concerned, there was only one side that was trying to score political points. The other side was trying to do what was right based on the best evidence that we had at the time.

https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-...

[loveistheanswer]

How would you know if your political party was trying to score political points? What specific criteria would have to be met?

[DarknessFalls]

Remember that across the globe, there are many complex political affiliations. As it turns out, the governments that tend to be more authoritarian, such as India, the U.K., or the U.S. during the last cycle, denied the efficacy of wearing masks or getting vaccinated. Boris Johnson went as far as to suggest he get Covid on stage with the cameras rolling, to show the dangers were exaggerated. Now he's well on his way to early retirement, thanks to the damage it's done.

[jokethrowaway]

Right wing governments are definitely less authoritarian than left wing ones.

Lockdown in left wing countries has been much worse (as in, you can't get out of this area, you need to wear masks outside) than in the UK or the US.

Tbh I was expecting better from the UK Tories and I wish they didn't implement all these restrictions and gave away so much money - but they did way better than other European countries I have friends in. At the same time, I've seen approval for Boris and Rishi Sunak increase among leftists, probably because they enacted pretty left wing policies.

[fabbari]

I see no true Scotsman, am I right?

[anoncake]

What left wing countries?

[Xplune13]

Don't know about the U.K or the U.S. but saying Indian Govt. denied the efficacy of wearing masks is false. The Indian Govt. had some questionable reaction to the pandemic but they never denied efficacy of wearing masks and vaccinations. On the contrary they actually encouraged people to wear masks and get vaccinated as fast as possible (when there were plenty of vaccines that is).

[hesarenu]

Hmm trying to change history? India govt is right winged but don't think they denied efficiency of masks or vaccination.

[tomrod]

Sort of. The infectious disease experts I know and worked with this past year are less worried about a political point and more worried that the immunity fades.

[__blockcipher__]

They must not think or read very deeply into their own field then, because there exists the phenomenom of immunological memory, ie the effect where memory B/T cells lay dormant in the body for decades, and upon exposure to the characteristic antigen of SARS-2 (in this case) they ramp up antibody production exponentially. This results in - theoretically, but this is definitely what happens - lower peak viral load, lower symptomacity, and thus lower transmission and a shorter disease course.

Thus even when full immunity to reinfection is gone - which btw the estimates I’ve seen are that IgG lasts a few years before the individual is seronegative again - there will still be immunological memory which persists indefinitely and vastly reduces mortality and morbidity.

[anonymouse008]

What always tickles me is if the immunity fades, you get a bout of no taste and smell for a few days, and recover again.

But we aren’t testing as much, so it’ll be worse for those at risk

[xienze]

> It almost seems like a lot of people don't want the data to indicate that natural immunity is strong and long lasting, even though the data shows that reinfection is extemely rare.

I too remember when the concept of "natural immunity to Covid" was a wild, dangerous conspiracy theory, along with the "came out of the Wuhan lab" theory. Funny watching the narrative change in real time.

[epakai]

They probably just don't want a repeat of the mis-steps that characterized early covid response. Early information changed a lot and resulted in distrust, and poor adherence to recommended measures. Rolling back precautionary measures is a one time thing. They don't get to say "hey we messed up, put those masks back on" because nobody will comply. It just makes sense to come up with a sure consensus before natural immunity is bandied about.

The lab leak theory is still not proven. Collected evidence over time points to it being more likely. The "narrative" was there early on, but attacking China as leverage in a trade war surely cemented any desire to hide their own faults. What did we stand to gain by pointing fingers without proof or even a preponderance of evidence? Even now is it likely to lead to reform in virus and gain of function research?

[ipaddr]

China wants to hide their own faults. Everything they do supports this narrative. To lose face might mean an end to power. Reforms are only possible by pointing likely theories because the proof is gone and it happened months before the outbreak was even registered.

[DC-3]

Natural immunity was never a dangerous conspiracy theory. It was simply the case that it was too early to have blind faith in it. No-one credible ever denied that it was possible or even that it was likely that people would gain natural immunity.

[ultralite]

> No-one credible ever denied that it was possible or even that it was likely that people would gain natural immunity.

Let's not rewrite history. It was clear that the media (e.g. BBC, below) chose to amplify messages that discredited natural immunity.

[Prof Wendy Barclay said:] "On the balance of evidence, I would say it would look as if immunity declines away at the same rate as antibodies decline away, and that this is an indication of waning immunity."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54696873 Oct 2020.

[8note]

The messages I saw were that achieving herd immunity through infections would result in a whole ton of deaths.

[i386]

> media [sic] chose to amplify messages that discredited natural immunity

The media is not a recognised scientific body.

[ultralite]

The BBC in this case were covering research by Imperial College London, one of the leading contributors to UK COVID-19 research.

In Oct 2020, if someone saw https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54696873 and commented, as you just have, "The media is not a recognised scientific body.", what would you have said?

[i386]

You are deliberately missing the point. BBC is not a recognized scientific body. It’s an editorial body that editorializes stories and publishes them. It is not a journal.

A lot of things have been said in the media about COVID, most of them wrong and few correct.

There is no conspiracy.

[Guvante]

I don't know that discrediting is a fair assessment. There is evidence of fewer or no markers in blood tests of patients who previously tested positive. Unfortunately it was impossible to tell whether that impacted immunity due insufficient time to collect data.

If losing markers is often an indicator of lost immunity then saying the expectation is lost immunity isn't wrong, even if that like ends up being false.

For instance data around infections from recovered and vaccinated people to others is still scarce to my knowledge. While we know that the health benefits for you are there whether it is enough immunity to completely prevent spread is still hard to examine.

[Guvante]

Technically the wild and crazy ones were "it was bio engineered" and "let's ignore it and gain herd immunity". The former was being touted as justification for violence against Asians and the latter would involve millions of deaths in most countries. Tens of millions world wide.

[dsyrk]

Would being a result of gain of function research with a particular furin cleavage site be considered “bio engineered”?

[Guvante]

I don't feel like playing "there isn't enough evidence to prove me wrong"

[dsyrk]

Source: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

Relevant text: For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so. “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

[sdsaga12]

Approximately 3.5 million globally have died from covid according to the WHO: https://covid19.who.int/

If you include deaths from related factors, like increased poverty or unrest, I'm sure the numbers go up a bit, but not to tens of millions.

I don't state this as an attack, by the way. Covid and its entangled cultural and political issues are enormously emotionally charged, and, one way or another, that tends to skew our perception of even relatively simple facts.

One thing I think the Hacker News community does well, at least aspirationally, is try to keep sight of the fundamental technical details of issues. For a pandemic, having an accurate intuition of its scale falls into this category IMO.

[Guvante]

COVID has a death per case rate of 3% give or take. It is estimated that only 1/3 of cases are confirmed. Thus we lose 1% of the people infected.

70% herd immunity without vaccines is 0.7% of your population basically. While I don't think we would lose the 49 million that implies unless we ignored it completely that does make saying we would lose 10s of millions if not for vaccinations not far fetched.

Yes I would put good odds we stay under 10 million in reality. I was only talking about the "natural herd immunity" idea.

[sdsaga12]

I see, I thought you were listing your understanding of the death toll that had already been reached in actuality and not the theoretical potential death toll without vaccine intervention. That makes more sense.

[jonnycomputer]

Natural immunity is great. If you survive. And if you don't give it to others.

Almost impossible not to give it to others.

Relying on it was pretty reckless, especially given how little we understand it.

[procombo]

> Almost impossible not to give it to others.

Your facts are old, very old.

Transmissibility has been linked to the nasopharyngeal viral load during onset symptoms. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33296437/] The virus may not be as present in your nasal discharge, or breath. We've also known from the start transmissibility is also definitely not linked to the severity of symptoms.

When you read from articles from the CDC such as [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...] they don't mean all people spread it the same way, just "we have found it spreads commonly in these three ways".

Ironically enough, we traced my positive infection to a non-human animal which sneezed in my face. Within a day I had conjunctivitis (pinkeye). I had non-typical symptoms before severe fatigue set in. I just thought I was going through bad caffeine withdrawal at the time.

Locked inside the house with my spouse and kids for two weeks with symptoms, breathing all over each other, laughing in each others faces, touching the same items, etc.

I only got tested on day 13 when the respiratory and heart symptoms set in. 6 months later I still have some lingering issues. Nobody else in the house or who I associated with ever got it, and they tested every 5 days for a month.

[jonnycomputer]

I hope you are recovering well.

Honestly not sure what your point is. Are you saying that for someone who is infected that the probability of not giving it to others around you is not very high?

The gist of what I'm saying is that even if you think that your chances of dying, or even inconvenience, from the virus is extremely low, your ability to control its spread to others is also pretty low. Meaning that you can become a vector to someone who is at high risk. So people going to corona-parties thinking only about the impact on themselves is reckless and selfish.

[procombo]

Initially my point was to correct misinformation. I added my own history as an anecdote.

There's a lot to say about Covid-19. We've learned a lot about it since the start. But objectively, its transmissibility is not what was feared. So the scare tactics about that -today- is wrong.

Covid-19 can be deadly. All people and politicians should have taken it seriously. I don't fault people for being enthusiastic in their political corner, and in the U.S. there were a lot of lines crossed by both sides.

My personal reaction was to be overly cautious. I got it anyway when I started being less strict. And it was nearly as bad as I feared. But I also think governments were wrong to force shutdowns, prevent assembly, etc. It was a misuse, and a spectacle.

High risk people have the option to do what they need to, or to be surrounded by people who advocates for them. (And that right there, I bet, is where you and I will fundamentally disagree). And I respect your disagreement.

Without safe vaccines we'd be having a different conversation. But now is the time to find more answers, spread truth, and be good to one another.

I actually find it a little fascinating that your comment, the first two replies (and mine) all differ tremendously in what we deem important takeaways.

As my doctor puts it "It is definitely a strange bug".

[jonnycomputer]

I still don't see the misinformation. I said, that it was "almost impossible not to give it to others". I said the virus was extremely transmissible. It is. With an R0 of approximately 5.7 [[1]]. I didn't say anything about when or how transmission happens.

There was a moment where we thought our daughter had the virus. It became quite clear how futile it was to avoid her infecting everyone else in the house. Fortunately for everyone, it was something else.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...

[plank_time]

This statement is overly alarmist. 98% of people survive covid. >85% are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. The vast majority of people survive without any issues. The biggest problem with covid is how infectious it is, which is what really overwhelms health care systems.

[jonnycomputer]

Over alarmist? You're saying 2% of people who get an incredibly transmissible disease die, and you aren't alarmed? I mean, sure its not Ebola, but its not a cold either. Sheez.

[wheels]

It's been very interesting to me listening particularly to American podcasts and the extent to which the American left equates Covid rules to piety. You can here that there's significant genuine resistantance to the idea of letting go of the restrictions as they've become part of identity.

I'm American, but I've lived in Germany for the last 20 years. Here, vaccines are being used as the carrot to be able to get rid of the restrictions (like mask wearing, limiting of contacts, etc.). It feels like everyone wants to get rid of the restrictions here, and it's more of a fight about who gets to do that first and why.

[hef19898]

My impression, as a German still following US politics post-Trump more than I should, is that US governors, especially the GOP ones, never put real restrictions in place and were among the first to get rid of them. Examples include Texas and Florida.

In Germany everything Covid turned political last fall, with Laschet being anti-restrictions and Söder being pro-restrictions. In both cases to score political points for their campaigns to become the conservative's candidate for chancellor.

Everybody wants back a normal life, some people simply have trouble accepting that it will take a while still. And that doing it prematurely poses a significant risk.

[cdolan]

I appreciate the fact you said this and find it ironic you are being downvoted for this heresy!

[flarg]

How do you know that reinfection is rare esp for variants? We've been in lock down and meant of those infected self isolate voluntarily or as a consequence of being sick.

And what's the consequence of your pov? That everyone just gets sick and those who make it are all good? What good is public policy if it doesn't protect the public?

[treeman79]

Enough time has passed that social distancing, masks, vaccines have become moral issues to many.

“Only bad people don’t wear masks” mentality. Completely separate from if they are still needed or not.

[sharken]

It certainly seems very hard for a lot of people in countries with high vaccination percentage to cope with Corona being "just another disease" at this point.

My hope is that all the laws and restrictions will be rolled back as we learn that we can live with Corona.

[paxys]

Almost like it's okay to dismiss statements made without ample research and evidence and accept them later when due diligence has been done.

[loveistheanswer]

Thats not how science works.

1. First you make a hypothesis.

2. Then you gather data.

If people arent allowed to make hypotheses or gather data around hypotheses, we can't do the scientific method.

[DarknessFalls]

Anecdotally, I've known at least three people who have caught Covid twice during the pandemic. This runs contrary to your statement that natural immunity "is strong and long lasting". Rather, it is a forgetful, fickle thing to rely upon. Get vaccinated.

[plank_time]

Anecdotally, I don’t know anyone personally who has gotten COVID. That doesn’t mean that I discount science and don’t believe that it exists.

Reinfection is extremely low otherwise it would have shown itself in the data. That’s really a simple fact.

[jonnycomputer]

Or maybe some people thought that serious accusations like this require evidence and looked askance upon Trump's xenophobic blame-shifting and hate-mongering. "the China virus" he likes to say.

And we see the consequences with old Asian ladies being punched in streets by young white thugs.

I've personally always held it as a possibility. But no way I'll defend the Trump administration on this.

[joemazerino]

> And we see the consequences with old Asian ladies being punched in streets by young white thugs.

Speaking of hate-mongering..are we seeing the same data on anti-Asian attacks?

[jonnycomputer]

If you have data, cough it up joe.

[jonnycomputer]

Let me see if I can say restate this more clearly.

I have always accepted the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in China. However, like many other Americans, I refused to be drawn into public speculation about it by people, like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, with a political and ideological interest in stoking xenophobia. In particular, I saw their attempt to blame China--before definitive evidence was acquired--as an attempt to shift blame away for the Trump administration's dismal response to the virus to external actors.

And yes, we have seen a rise in anti-Asian hate crime and sinophobia in America, largely as a result of this kind of rhetoric.