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by AstralStorm 1329 days ago
You're right, the correct comparison for COVID is actually measles. And it's more evasive than that - the vaccine and acquired immunity does not hold nearly as well.

Measles was controlled by mass vaccination that provides for years of neutralizing antibody response combined with merciless quarantine on outbreaks.

COVID vaccine of today does not achieve that. It's still much better than nothing, but insufficient to control it.
1 comments
taolegal 1329 days ago
> the correct comparison for COVID is actually measles

According to what, infectiousness and transmission?

Measles is still a ridiculous comparison. The only comparison is influenza, SARS or something along those lines.

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AstralStorm 1329 days ago
Literally Rt for either of those is much lower, and sequelae plus death rates don't match in severity. Measles, similar to COVID, temporarily messes up immune system in a number of cases. (Though by a different mechanism.) Besides vaccine effectiveness - which is why COVID is not under control. And it took 20 years to reduce deaths from that virus worldwide. COVID explodes in similar ways as measles when it gets into a school or care facility.

We are slightly lucky the Omicron is not as deadly as Delta... but new variants might be getting there soon.

Even the worst influenza epidemic did not meet the Rt, and it was less deadly than Delta. That 100 years ago, before vaccines, after a huge war with starved people. Flu now has also a half decent vaccine if the predictions work, better at neutralizing it and limiting the spread.

I want to hear a reasoned argument why it should be compared to influenza or SARS, besides "it is an airborne spread". Even MERS is not there.

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taolegal 1329 days ago
> We are slightly lucky the Omicron is not as deadly as Delta... but new variants might be getting there soon.

this is exactly the type of unbounded fearmongering and disinformation that supposed science-advocates love to spread, as though covid will slip into a wave of death at any moment after experts forced everyone to get injected under the promise that it'd all end

> Flu now has also a half decent vaccine if the predictions work, better at neutralizing it and limiting the spread

half decent? that's a really generous framing for hit-or-miss low efficacy.

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AstralStorm 1328 days ago
Fearmongering? I believe you are just ignorant. Let me dispell some of that with primary sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34206453/ https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/5-things-to-know-omicron

BA.5 and XBB do lead to more severe disease than BA.1, though still not as many deaths as Delta. There are further even worse developments already getting percentages over BA.5. (BA.4.6 and BQ.7) Again, not much worse, but still an increment. The worst symptom that's new is extreme fatigue.

It is only a few mutations to return to origin and start wrecking lungs again in addition to being spreadable.

Some researchers brought back a chunk of Delta spike into BA.1 and got 80% kill rate in mice. And it is just a few genes. Since XBB shows that variants can, though not easily, crosslink, someone might become this unlucky patient one generating a deadly cross between Delta and Omicron. A variant of Delta that gained some of Omicron features by evolution was also quite deadly, but fortunately it did not catch on and become a variant of concern. We're lucky so far.

Flu vaccine is half decent in that when it works, it gives neutralizing immunity. Keyword is when it works. That is, if the variants in the vaccine match well enough to the current wild ones. It is high efficacy if the guess is right. When the guess is off, having been vaccinated for a similar variant reduces severity and complications a lot, still.

Current COVID vaccine does not in general give neutralizing immunity even when variants match. It means it cannot stop the virus being passed around to immunocompromised, sick or unvaccinated. It reduces the time it's being spread but that is not sufficient. It also reduces chance of people ending up in hospital or dead and severity of symptoms. We do not know how much it reduces chances of Long COVID yet. Because it's not doing much to the spread, people get ill at a similar rate, just milder.

There are developments for mucosal vaccine that can fix this problem.

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AstralStorm 1328 days ago
Regarding increasing fusogenicity which causes lung cells to get destroyed: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.19.512891v1

See Figures 3 and 4.

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