LogFAQs > #946557906

adjl posted...

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).

No, its based on the fact that the most successful coronovirus vaccine we've had is the flu and it's what like 30-50% effective at best from year to year. To expect a vaccine to reduce this down to zero cases is absurd.

adjl posted...

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.

And it could potentially become even less lethal if we resume life as normal. It already seems to be less lethal than when it first took the world by storm and the death rate was estimated to be around 5%. Some of that could've been due to people like Cuomo causing it circulate in nursing homes though before incompetent governors and various other bureaucrats figured "hey maybe thats not a good idea."

Sure, we could ride this out for god knows how long counting on a vaccine to work effectively while people die in the process from covid and the side effects of a shit economy or we resume and maybe lethality is reduced to what the flu or even common cold is