Thread: Corona Virus

I believe any vaccine will need to be given every 6~12 months. Herd immunity will never be achieved with any illness, able to be contracted more than once.

Over the last 15 years I have seem my four doctors often suggest people delay having Flu Vaccine unless it is already very active in the area as its protection fades relatively quickly - This years was nuts early as was last year. This year was Flu VaX and toilet paper then $20 crayfish nuts

Flu vax covers best for a number of months. Its still a wait and see on how long the Covid Vax lasts for and if it is significantly seasonal like influenza is. I am still hoping it just evaporates like Swine flu, ChickFlu and SARs did. saddly it looks like its going to stick around for a while.

Originally Posted by superquag

Got the impression it would last more than one season,

depends on the source, the type of vaccine and the particular strain.

How long do vaccines last? The surprising answers may help protect people longer | Science | AAAS

Originally Posted by NavyDiver

I am still hoping it just evaporates like Swine flu,

swine flu didnt evaporate. it became the dominant strain until 2017

Originally Posted by V8Ian

I believe any vaccine will need to be given every 6~12 months. Herd immunity will never be achieved with any illness, able to be contracted more than once.

Could you - rough and ready - define 'Herd Immunity' ? - Then check yourself with this WIKI link. Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a Covid-19 vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid' - CNN

Relevant bit:- "Individuals can become immune by recovering from an earlier infection or through vaccination.[3]"

(Merrill, R. M. (2013). Introduction to Epidemiology. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. pp. 68–71. ISBN 978-1449645175. Retrieved 29 March 2015.



But you are both wrong (me too) .... drum roll please ...... NOT today, the WHO knows better.... now, ONLY Vaccination can generate that desperately desired state 'Community Immunity' WHO Changes Definition of “Herd Immunity”: ‘Immunity Comes Solely From Vaccines’ - News Punch

Originally Posted by superquag

.... ....

But you are both wrong (me too) .... drum roll please ...... NOT today, the WHO knows better.... now, ONLY Vaccination can generate that desperately desired state 'Community Immunity' WHO Changes Definition of “Herd Immunity”: ‘Immunity Comes Solely From Vaccines’ - News Punch

Not sure if this should be in the Jokes section or the Conspiracy Theories section given the track record of that source.

NewsPunch is a Los Angeles-based fake news website known for spreading conspiracy theories, political misinformation and hoaxes, mixed in with real news stories.^[1] Originally named Your News Wire,^[4][10][11] it was founded in 2014 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway.^[2][5][12] In November 2018, it rebranded itself as NewsPunch, and began redirecting yournewswire.com traffic to newspunch.com.^[10]
A 2017 BuzzFeed News report identified NewsPunch as being the second-largest source of popular fake stories spread on Facebook that year,^[5] and a June 2018 Poynter analysis identified NewsPunch as being debunked over 80 times in 2017 and 2018 by Poynter-accredited factcheckers such as Snopes, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Associated Press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsPunch

Originally Posted by superquag

Could you - rough and ready - define 'Herd Immunity' ? - Then check yourself with this WIKI link. Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a Covid-19 vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid' - CNN

Relevant bit:- "Individuals can become immune by recovering from an earlier infection or through vaccination.[3]"

(Merrill, R. M. (2013). Introduction to Epidemiology. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. pp. 68–71. ISBN 978-1449645175. Retrieved 29 March 2015.



But you are both wrong (me too) .... drum roll please ...... NOT today, the WHO knows better.... now, ONLY Vaccination can generate that desperately desired state 'Community Immunity' WHO Changes Definition of “Herd Immunity”: ‘Immunity Comes Solely From Vaccines’ - News Punch

My (very lay) definition of herd immunity is enough of the population who cannot contract a particular illness, making any outbreak minor with no chance of widespread contraction.
Many illnesses, such as tuberculosis and measles etc., had been all but eliminated, but are now returning via foreigners.
TB was eliminated, at great expense, by vaccination and destruction of wild bovine, carrying the disease.
Humans can gain immunity from many illnesses by contraction or vaccination, but only illnesses that can be contracted only once.

Originally Posted by Eevo

the US is much more connected than aust. by connected i mean movement of people. both by volume and percentage.
the virus was undetected due to china withholding information. thousands were infected in the US before covid was announced and identified. all the president stuff came later. after it was too late, so its irrelevant.

the US is much close to herd immunity than aust. will take another 2-3 years to get to 80%. we'll see the number of infections ramp up over the next 18 month. thats not a failure of the health system or the people, thats just the maths involved with infectious disease.

this is how pandemics works. every pandemic in history, from the spanish flu to the black death to the plague of justinian has ended with herd immunity (or it becomes endemic, which is a possibility). not from lockdown, not from isolation, not from social distancing. we like to think that us humans are the masters of our destiny but we're about to get a rude wakeup call that we cant control things like pandemics. yes our science and medicine and knowledge is better than 100 years ago, but I'm doubting its good enough. a lot of people are placing a lot of faith in a vaccine. never has a vaccine ended a pandemic. after 25 years we still dont have an effective vaccine for hiv, influenza, rhinovirus. "but what about smallpox?" i hear you you cry. yes we eradicated it, after 200 years. buckle up kids, covid is here to stay.

The virus entering the USA had little if anything to do with China witholding information. It has had a lot more to do with the US acting too late to stop Chinese from entering the USA, but doing nothing to stop others from China entering, and having no procedures to isolate or quarantine or keep track of those who entered. Meanwhile, infected individuals were entering unnoticed from Italy, infecting New York and surrounding areas.

You are right, very few infectious diseases have been eliminated totally from the world. The exception of course is smallpox (vaccine). But major endemic and epidemic or pandemic diseases that have been eliminated (or almost entirely eliminated) from Australia (mainly by a combination of vaccine and quarantine, but also other public health measures) include polio, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, measles, mumps, rubella, TB, diphtheria, and probably others that don't come immediately to mind. Others solely by quarantine, including rabies for example.

None have been eliminated by letting the country get to herd immunity. For most diseases, this will simply not happen, as before herd immunity is reached, spread becomes so slow that new cohorts arrive faster than the spread.

What you young people fail to appreciate is the changes from when I was a child when my parents were terrified of infectious diseases, and with good reason. So there are still some that we have no vaccine for? Yes, but when did a member of your family last die from polio, TB, Diphtheria, whooping cough, etc?

In a worldwide sense covid may be here to stay, but there is every reason to believe that it can be eliminated from Australia, and future outbreaks prevented by including an effective vaccine in the regular schedule for a sufficiently high proportion of the population that herd immunity exists to prevent the spread of cases when infections are imported, exactly as happens, for example, today with measles.

As I pointed out earlier, this is not practically achievable by immunity acquired from infection. This would result in exactly the same situation as we had with measles before a vaccine was available and in widespread use - it was always there, most kids got it, and nearly all of them survived it. For the unlucky few who did not, and, since it was much more serious for adults (like covid) a larger proportion of those who caught it as adults, well, they were dead. More probably died from the immune suppression aftereffect of measles than the disease itself (lasts a couple of years).