faetal on 11/2/2021 at 00:48
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
Viral variants? What do you mean?
Variants that have different properties (illness more severe, easier spreading, etc)? Or are you worried that the existing vaccines might not protect properly against new variants? Or something else? Just curious.
Mutants. Slightly different DNA > slightly different proteins > slightly increased chance of evading the immune response we mount either as a result of having the virus, or being vaccinated.
Also, variation means some chance of increased infectivity, virulence etc, but also some chance of a decrease in those things. Increased infectivity is likely to be selected for due to replicative success being better over time with more hosts, with increased virulence not being inherently beneficial to the virus (unless we're talking more frequent coughing / sneezing), so doubt we'll see an increase over time in that.
SubJeff on 11/2/2021 at 10:22
Yes Gryz, all of what faetal said.
We already have our own more infective variant. The South African variant is resisted less by the AZ vaccine, enough that it's roll out in SA has been stopped.
The UK variant is putting the willies up the EU so we'll have more travel restrictions. Although I think all non-essential travel should have been stopped a year ago.
mopgoblin on 11/2/2021 at 12:06
It's not too surprising that vaccines aren't a silver bullet, what with 15-20% of common cold cases being due to other coronaviruses, and the patterns of mutation we've seen there making a vaccine infeasible in that case. I feel like a lot of countries were recklessly banking on a vaccine to be the solution, and that helped them justify shorter/less effective shutdowns to themselves because they figured a vaccine would clean up the mess in the end (since this is really motivated by economic reasoning, this is essentially gambling, for financial advantage, on the mutation rate being low enough that there's only a small risk of the additional cases actually yielding a new strain that poses problems for the vaccines that get developed). Of course, every new case is another chance for a new mutation to arise, so in this case vaccines are really more of a complementary tool, best used alongside other measures to maximise the odds of an elimination strategy succeeding.
Incidentally, this gambling on mutations problem is a lot like the issue with antibiotic misuse in agriculture (which is part of why I mentioned that earlier) - in that case, drip-feeding antibiotics to livestock is profitable, which is essentially mining the evolutionary buffer protecting us from antibiotic-resistant bacteria to make money. Same basic principles and nasty capitalist mindset of leveraging public good for private profit wherever possible.
Gryzemuis on 11/2/2021 at 12:47
I don't think it's fair to compare misuse of antibiotics to the corona crisis.
If you have a permanent job, it's easy to judge. You get paid, and you will get paid as long as the pandemic lasts. But what if you don't have a permanent job? What if you're a temp, and your contract does not get prolonged? It's easier when there are 2 working grownups, one loses her/his job, and the other has a permanent job. What if you both lose your job? What if you're single and lose your job? Lots of jobs can be done from home, talking on the phone, or via zoom/teams/video. But lotsa jobs can not.
I have a friend who is a professional musician. He made a living from performing live during the last 15 years. That has stopped last year March, completely. In the first months of the pandemic, they got some money from our government. But not anymore. He's married, his wife works from home, so they can eat and pay the mortgage. He now took a job in a recovery-home, do all kinds of non-medical work, to help give the professionals more time to do the important stuff. It doesn't pay much, but it helps. The only benefit is that he got vaccinated early.
I quit my job 2 years ago. In 2019 I did some project for myself. The plan was to go look for a job in 2020. Well, that didn't work out. I got kinda hired in the summer of 2020, but after 3 months it turned out it was impossible for me to start. I should have spent a few weeks/months in India with a bunch of new colleagues, and that was just not possible. India has a 20-day mandatory quarantine when traveling between cities. (For that would have been 20 days in a hotelroom). Too bad, because the job and the company sounded like a lot of fun. Someone else offered me a job end of 2020, but that didn't happen either. (The whole project got cancelled).
I'm talking to someone right now for another attempt at a job. Fingers crossed that that job does happen. I'm not starving of hunger yet, but I'm getting older every day, making it harder for me to find a new job, as every day progresses. (FYI, I was told that NL is the country with the most age-discriminatie. When you're over 50 years old, nobody wants to hire you anymore. Bastards).
Covid-19 has not made things easier for a lot of people. Especially for people who already didn't have the best position in society. (To be clear, I'm not talking about myself). I don't have the answer how we should have handled things. I don't think a 6 week full/complete/totalitarian lockdown would have worked. We're not on an island here. This medal has 2 sides. We're not just talking about people trying to get rich. Some of them just want to pay the bills.
Harvester on 11/2/2021 at 13:43
I agree, people's livelihoods are at stake here. Small store owners and bar/restaurant owners have their personal savings and pensions tied up in their businesses, it was on the news yesterday. If their store or bar goes bankrupt, often they have nothing left to their name (sometimes they even have to move from their homes to a small rented house) and if they don't manage to build something up before retirement they have to survive on the basic senior citizen stipend, which is very meager and also the reason every sensible Dutch person is working to get their monthly pension to a level which allows for some comfort during old age. Also, people without stable contracts that get paid by the hour are really struggling here, they're the first ones to go and they only have basic government assistance to fall back on, and in many other countries nothing at all.
To frame this purely as a case of capitalist greed and big corporate interests is too simple.
faetal on 11/2/2021 at 15:50
Since the rate of mutation is directly proportionate to rate of active hosts (viruses only replicate when they are hijacking cells, mutations only happen at a significant rate during replication), I'd say that betting on vaccines as the most effective response is absolutely the only sensible option. Even if we have to keep developing vaccines to get it down to the level of a scary seasonal virus (like influenza), then so be it.
Letting it run rampant is vastly increasing the probability of this being a longer term issue and all countries not taking a zero COVID response are rightly going to wind up as pariahs to all of the countries who got their shit together and took this seriously.
mopgoblin on 11/2/2021 at 21:25
I'm well aware of how bad things can get for people without a steady job that survives everything shutting down, because that's exactly the position I was in - self-employed, doing work that can only be done in-person and isn't considered essential, and with fairly limited savings. That's a scary position to be in. If NZ hadn't shut down everything it could and eliminated the virus relatively quickly, and instead drawn things out with half-measures in anticipation of a vaccine, I could well have lost everything. That's what I'm talking about with the short-term thinking - shutting everything down to eliminate the virus is better for the economy in the long run, if you do it right and provide adequate financial support for the duration.
Over here we've had a few scares at the border, but because we went hard early on there's been no need to shut anything down for like 6+ months. Can you imagine being stuck paying rent on commercial premises for 6+ months, as a new business that was already struggling to become profitable, without being able to monetise that? Can you imagine starting a business now, where that's a constant threat, and no one will insure you against it?
To be clear, I'm not saying vaccines are a bad move or that we shouldn't be putting resources into them, I think the combination of vaccines and shutting things down could have killed off the virus for sure (even in difficult situations of high population density) if countries had done more to limit the spread before they were completed, to minimise the chance of problematic mutations happening in the first place. Relying on vaccines alone isn't a zero COVID response, minimising transmission by all available means is. Vaccines should have been the finishing move in the event our previous attempts didn't quite get us there. But if I know governments, they'll treat vaccines as something they can leverage to "buy back" the ability to keep more things open, which is exactly what will get us into a cycle of seasonal vaccine whack-a-mole rather than elimination.
faetal on 11/2/2021 at 21:48
Agree.
SubJeff on 12/2/2021 at 11:10
I think we were never going to eliminate this, but yes - seasonal Covid will be a thing because we've not kiboshed it hard enough.
bob_doe_nz on 14/2/2021 at 06:13
3 day lockdown in 5 hours. WOOOOO!!!