Bobref

So, the answer is to isolate the vulnerable population while everyone else leads “normal” lives? Have you tried to get into a nursing home recently? I have, and it’s next to impossible. Isolation is what they’re trying to do now. And even now while we’re sheltering in place,” you still see the tragic results when the virus gets into a nursing home. Assuming you could ethically justify it, there’s no practical way to make it work in the long term. And even if it did, what do we do about the diabetics, the people on chemotherapy, the people with auto-immune diseases like lupus or Crohn’s, the people taking anti-rejection drugs after transplants, all the people with less than robust immune systems? You must understand, when you’re talking about focusing on protecting the vulnerable population, you’re talking about upwards of 50 million people. If you can think of a practical way to protect 50 million people without restricting the other 250 million living side by side with them, let somebody know.

When was the last time someone died of smallpox? Or polio? Vaccines essentially eradicated those two horrible viral diseases. The hope is a vaccine may do the same to SARS-CoV-2. And please stop comparing COVID-19 to influenza. The comparison is inapposite and dangerous.

I’m certainly open-minded on the subject, as we’re learning new things every day. But I cannot see any justification for allowing large gatherings of people before there’s a vaccine. And as for “Vaccines have been available for decades but people still get that illness,” I presume you’re talking about the “flu,” i.e., the many different strains of influenza viruses. The comparison is a misleading and dangerous one for many reasons, not the least of which is that SARS-CoV-2 is at least twice as contagious as the flu, and between 15 to 20 times more likely to be lethal. The acuity is even higher in the vulnerable population. “Flattening the Curve” is another way of saying we’re fighting a delaying action. Given time and the absence of restrictions and no vaccine, virtually every person in the US will be exposed to the virus. The object of the current strategy is to stretch that time frame out as long as possible, while working to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible. The sooner we can insert a vaccine into that timeline, the more people will have immunity when they are eventually exposed.

What is it that makes the end of May an appropriate stopping place? Do you anticipate that we will have “flattened the curve” so that deaths will level off at a rate that is “acceptable?” What rate is that? Because this virus is not going away. Until there is a vaccine, a significant segment of the population will be at constant risk of mortal illness. The only way to keep our at-risk population safe is to keep significant restrictions in place until there is a vaccine, or at least an accepted, well-tested treatment regimen that works. Otherwise, there is the potential for our elderly population to be decimated ... as we are seeing in some nursing homes across the country, including Anderson, IN. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-04-12/nursing-homes-deaths-soar-past-2-600-in-alarming-surge

The numbers keep lowering because (a) we’re learning more and more about the virus all the time, and (b) what we’re doing is working. As long as the virus is still here — which it unquestionably is — and there are hundreds of millions waiting to be infected — which there are — why would you consider stopping what we are doing?

I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it’s probably a quack.

The real problem is that there are actually people who believe this conspiracy theory stuff. Intellectually, they should be lumped in with the rest of the anti-vaxxers.

Mostly, what that guy needs is to do something with his hair. 🤭

Gotta part company with you on this one, @Howe. There are 50 million people in this country in the high risk group, just waiting to get infected. Remove the restrictions and they are at significant risk without a vaccine. I don’t like the idea of potentially sacrificing them on the altar of the economy — especially since I’m in that group. We will find a way to ride this out until there’s a vaccine or an effective, widely available treatment protocol.

This is what I’m waiting for someone to explain to me. Current projections — and they are updating every day — say total US diagnosed cases will hit somewhere between 6 and 700,000 by August. In any event, still under a million. And let’s assume because of the unavailability of testing early on, or lack of significant symptoms, there are 10 times that many people who had the virus undiagnosed, and now have immunity. That still leaves more than 300 million people in the US who are defenseless against the virus, 50 million or so of whom are over 65, immune-suppressed, or otherwise in the high risk group. There’s not going to be a vaccine for at least a year. In those circumstances, how can you justify putting 60,000 people into a football stadium for several hours a few hundred times, or 20,000 in a basketball arena thousands of times. Or even 100 kids in a lecture hall a few million times? This is far from over.

Do you plan on naming your next virus BARRYOSAMA? 😉

I certainly am not going to fault the epidemiologists for taking what was then extremely limited data on a brand new virus and planning for the worst case scenario. Anything else is classic Monday morning quarterbacking. The measures taken in many countries far exceeded our own, and they still dealt with a lot more trouble than we did. The fact that we have actually “flattened the curve” speaks to the timeliness and effectiveness of the measures taken, and the heroic response of the medical community. But until there’s a vaccine or an effective treatment protocol sufficiently tested, we are going to be dealing with this virus. We need to be very, very careful about relaxing what has been shown to work.

I really don’t understand the pervasive need in our society to assign blame. Nothing bad can possibly happen without someone being to blame for it. The first thing we do when calamity strikes is start looking for someone to point the figure at. We are in the midst of something unprecedented in our lifetimes. We’ve had pandemics before. But not recently for a virus that is both highly contagious and for which there is no vaccine and no accepted effective treatment protocol. But instead of focusing on the implications of that, we have lots of people bitching about doctored statistics, Big Pharma, the FDA, China, and, of course, Trump. Every time I think I can’t get more disappointed in our society, I’m proved wrong. Edit: On reflection, it occurs to me that it’s ironic that I feel this way after working 40 yrs. as an attorney engaged in civil litigation. We’ve elevated finger pointing to an art form.

So are weather forecasters. Yet, you check the forecast every day and take it into account going forward. Why should this be any different? You listen to the experts, make a plan, and if it turns out they are wrong, you make a new plan and live with it.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about treatments and vaccines. The fact is there won’t be drug treatment specifically designed to treat the disease, as opposed to the symptoms, in 2020, and a vaccine won’t happen for 12-18 mos. as a best case scenario. This article is a week old. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-exactly-where-were-at-with-vaccines-and-treatments-for-covid-19 However, Dr. Anthony FauciTrusted Source, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters last week that a vaccine won’t be available for widespread use for at least another 12 to 18 months. This is the timeline to complete the phase III clinical studies. There’s no guarantee that the vaccine candidates will work. “There’s a lot of uncertainty with vaccine development,” Lee said. “Naturally, you have to make sure the vaccine is safe. But you also have to make sure the vaccine will elicit enough of an immune response.” Like drugs, potential vaccines have to pass through the same clinical trial stagesTrusted Source. This is especially important when it comes to safety, even during a pandemic. “The public’s willingness to back quarantines and other public-health measures to slow spread tends to correlate with how much people trust the government’s health advice,” Shibo Jiang, a virologist at Fudan University in China, wrote in the journal NatureTrusted Source. “A rush into potentially risky vaccines and therapies will betray that trust and discourage work to develop better assessments,” he said.

There is a 0% chance that an effective vaccine could be developed, mass produced, distributed, and administered in 2020.

You may be right. There’s no way to know. But from a public health standpoint you have to hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Think of it this way: We have had a flu vaccine for many years, which does a very good job of preventing those 3-4 strains of the influenza virus that epidemiologists predict will pose the greatest risk that year. But it doesn’t prevent other strains of flu, and not everybody gets the shot. We haven’t practiced “social distancing,” or any of these other measures currently in force in order to address the flu. Every year in the US there are more than 30 million cases of the flu and a little over 30,000 deaths. Obviously, we don’t have anything like enough data to make final projections yet. But based on what we know now, the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the COVID-19 disease is at least twice as contagious as influenza and somewhere between 14 and 23 times as likely to kill you as the flu. There’s no vaccine and if we have one in the next 12 months it will be nothing short of a miracle. WAKE UP! Social distancing and sheltering in place-type restrictions are the only thing that is saving us from numbers like 50 million infected and a million deaths!

The comparison is inapposite. The “flu” is actually several different viruses. The annual flu shot actually addresses only 3-4 of those — the ones epidemiologists believe will be most prevalent. So, getting the flu after having a flu shot is not only possible, it’s relatively common. That would not happen with a COVID-19 vaccine, which would be targeted to that specific virus. There is another reason the comparison is apples to oranges. COVID-19 is much more contagious than the flu. The degree of “contagiousness” of a virus is measured by its basic reproduction rate or RO (“R naught”): the average number of people who catch the disease from a single infected individual. The RO for most strains of influenza is about 1.3 i.e., flu victims infect 1.3 other people. They haven’t arrived at a final RO for COVID-19 yet, but it’s going to be somewhere between 2 and 3, meaning this virus is likely to be at least twice as contagious as the flu. The third reason the comparison is unhelpful is that this disease is much more severe than the flu, potentially. The US death rate from influenza is about 0.1%. We don’t have a firm handle on the death rate from COVID-19 yet, but the published studies so far place it somewhere between 1.4% and 2.3%, meaning it’s 14 to 23 times more lethal than the flu. Looking at COVID-19 the same way you look at the flu is of very limited use, and potentially, very dangerous.

A vaccine anytime before next Spring is an unrealistic hope. Has nothing to do with the FDA. It takes at least that long to actually do the work. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-take-to-develop-a-coronavirus-vaccine

What makes you think they’re not?

As I said. Haters gonna hate.