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| Topic | Mandatory quarantine camps being set up in New Zealand! |
| adjl 10/31/20 10:11:35 PM #59: | OhhhJa posted... If we're counting on a vaccine to make a coronavirus go away, well... you know the saying about wishing in one hand and s***ting in the other? If a vaccine won't make it go away (an assumption that's being made based on pretty much nothing except the fact that there hasn't been a successful one before, which kind of ignores pretty much the entire history of scientific progress), neither will herd immunity. Vaccines work by providing herd immunity, they just skip the rather unpleasant step of letting a buttload of people die until enough of the population has been infected to attain herd immunity (again, the threshold here is likely to be well above 90%, given that measles is in that range and is much less infectious). OhhhJa posted... Viruses naturally evolve to become less deadly to their host. There's very little selective pressure for that in the case of Covid. As everyone's so fond of pointing out, its mortality rate is actually quite low already, and the fact that it's able to spread so readily without causing any symptoms at all (let alone killing the host) means it has very little to gain by evolving to be less lethal. Any less-lethal variant that arises is going to have virtually no reproductive advantages over the regular version, which makes it selectively neutral. --- This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts. ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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