Seems like children under 9 are not effected much at all, not sure about under 2 tho.

For some reason, coronaviruses generally rarely affect children -- and those that get it rarely spread it to others despite children being fucking disease magnets.

This seems not to be very well understood, but it is really interesting.

So far there are no known cases affecting children under 2 (as of two days ago when I read the paper about coronavirus and children)

> So far there are no known cases affecting children under 2

This is not the case, there have been a couple of babies infected in Singapore.

There have been several infants in China having contracted COVID-19. But no deaths yet.

Seems worse than the average flu AND unlike the flu, there's no vaccine (and there probably won't be one in time to make much of a difference).

They need a minimum of 18 months (assuming perfect conditions) to be able to commercialize a vaccine.

Can anyone just explain how in hell it takes so long to develop a vaccine?

Vaccine creators aren't supposed to have billions of USD to make their job? What's the real problem here?

1. Come up with the vaccine

2. Test vaccine on animals

3. Prove to regulators vaccine is safe enough for limited human trials

4. Conduct limited human trials

5. Research effectiveness of vaccine / absence of side effects

6. Conduct broader human trials

7. Step 5 again

8. Scale up production of vaccine

Now, imagine that you can fail at any step and go back to the starting point.

I know most people here like to defend the established ways of doing things. But in an crisis like this we need to go back to first principles and see which steps are really needed and what can be speed up.

Every day we waste people die.

a rushed vaccine that has poorly understood side effects like say cancer rate differences or is fatal for people with some other disease is more dangerous than the disease itself. Many more people will end up taking the vaccine than just those having the infection.

If this situation got really bad, what are the chances of this timeline being accelerated? The US has step 1 done now. Could we roll the dice on doing broader human trials immediately and also in parallel scale up production? Sure you might kill people in trials and waste lots of money, but may be better than the alternative of tens of millions dead.

Are you volunteering?

My understanding is that it is very labor intensive and the manufacturing capacity is simply not there to make billions of doses in a short timescale (months).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Manufacturin...