At a certain point, the choice between: "Do I want to lose a few days of my life to a disease with a tiny chance of a bad outcome?" vs "Do I want to lose a year+ of my life not doing what I enjoy?" becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

In March/April - I didn't leave my apartment for a month (besides tossing trash across the hall).

I still avoid most any indoor spaces, wear n95 masks and am not planning any plane travel (one of my biggest enjoyments) or visiting friends/family indoors this winter...

But I'm starting to seriously debate licking every door knob I pass just to get it over with already.

Getting sick puts not just you at risk, but your family, friends, coworkers, and anyone you come in contact with after and during the fact.

It also could generate unnecessary strain on our health system that is already over capacity.

There's no need. Stay at home, stay protected, and don't take an unnecessary risk because you can't be mildly inconvenienced to save someone else's life.

Really starting to get sick of this moral posturing. 1 year isn't a "mild inconvenience", the lockdown have been absolutely devastating to many many people, but of course you wouldn't know that because you probably WFH on a comfy salary for a tech company?

Once again, you misread.

I said their specific reasoning is a mild inconvenience.

And no, funnily enough, I'm unemployed (working on an early stage startup) and my savings are in the low triple digits -- total -- thanks to the pandemic. Might want to start limiting the number of assumptions you make.

> you can't be mildly inconvenienced to save someone else's life.

A major disruption for a year isn't a "mild inconvenience." The longer this goes on, expect more and more people to feel like GP.

> "Do I want to lose a year+ of my life not doing what I enjoy?"

Sounds like a mild inconvenience to me. Any other reason wouldn't be.

And of not doing what you want. At a year, you start going through math around the likelihood you'd die from the virus and realizing that even with a 1% mortality rate, for someone with the whole life ahead of them, the time/opportunity EV is negative.

There are people who set a monetary value on human life, and we have good estimates on that. What we don't have a good number for is what's the value of different degrees of freedom. Is a life where traveling is impractical, meeting people is challenging, you can't go to Disneyland, all that stuff, is it worth 75% of a life at 2019 levels? I don't mean this economically, I mean this as living life.

> , you start going through math around the likelihood you'd die from the virus and realizing that even with a 1% mortality rate, for someone with the whole life ahead of them, the time/opportunity EV is negative.

Could you elaborate on this? By EV you mean the expected value?

Yeah. It's not quite the same as EV, but the idea is that living one year of your life 75% "fully" is like reducing your life expectancy by 3 months. If you have another 50 years to live, if the choice is between 75% fully and any less than a 1 in 200 chance of dying or having lasting complications, you take your chances. Where this gets awkward is the elderly because it takes away one of their five good years left, but the alternative is a 15% chance of dying.

> "Do I want to lose a few days of my life to a disease with a tiny chance of a bad outcome?"

There's a high chance of a bad outcome, there's a tiny chance of death. The virus affects your lungs and brain, and who knows what other parts of the body we haven't been alerted to yet.

As time goes on we'll be back to "plague doors" for cafes and restaurants. We'll adjust our way of doing business so that we don't rely on having all the key people in a company in one room for irrelevant meetings (I mean we can dream, right?).

maybe we re more likely to find a cure rather than vaccine. most epidemiologists think a vaccine won't even be possible considering past experience with coronaviruses

> most epidemiologists think a vaccine won't even be possible

Unsourced statements like this are unhelpful.

The language I've heard is "there is no guarantee of a vaccine" which is very different to thinking it won't be possible at all. I'd suggest with the 200+ plus vaccine candidates being developed that many believe it is possible.

There are many different concerns. I havent done a rigorous meta-analysis but they also come from very respectable scientists.

> https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-may-be-i...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

And notice that there haven't been very exciting news from the vaccine developmnent trials. If anything there were more setbacks than pleasant surprises.

There were concerns because SARS vaccine attempts hadn't been further developed due to apparent cytokine storm problems. I think we're far enough along to be confident that that isn't an issue with vaccines for this virus.

Some people also make a comparison to the common cold coronaviruses which have a lot of strains and might be rapidly mutating. Honestly, it's a bad comparison because it's clear this coronavirus isn't mutating rapidly, and besides we haven't really tried to target common cold coronaviruses - why would we when rhinoviruses are the most frequent cause of the common cold?

There's a bit more to it. The reason vaccines weren't developed previously for other coronaviruses is because in trials for a RSV vaccine, 80% of treated kids that got infected needed hospitalisation and two died, while something like 5% of the control infections needed hospitalisation. Due to antibody-dependent enhancement.

So yes there are immunopathology concerns with eliciting a T-cell response, and inducing a humoral immune response has the potential to make things worse.

That's why most trials take a look at the Th1 vs Th2 response to see if there's any indication of ADE. The currently available data do not seem to point to that.

It's unlikely. I'm much more likely fatalities will drop to zero per week before the end of the year in countries with high spread and we'll have herd immunity (which is where Sweden is at now).

> we'll have herd immunity (which is where Sweden is at now).

No, even Sweden's epidemiologists say that up to 30% of their population could be immune.[1] They tried to shoot the moon but missed. They are in a similar place to nearby countries now but got there with a much higher death toll

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uk-abandoned-herd-immunity...

Herd immunity isn't possible when antibodies are as transient as those seen for COVID-19. Only a massive public push with an actually effective vaccine will control this pandemic.

That's just flat out wrong. If that were the case, than the Spanish Flu would still be killing millions of people per year.

SARS-CoV-2 and A/H1N1 aren't even in the same phylum. It would be silly to expect them to have precisely the same effect. Besides, when people gush about "herd immunity" they don't usually include the caveat "of course it's going to kill fifty million people first!"

There have been what, three cases of people being infected twice? And they barely got sick?

The antibodies from infected people are being shown to last somewhere on an average of 3 months.

Kinda hard to be immune if you have nothing to protect you.

How sick you get from the disease is irrelevant in this context.

Your understanding of the immune system is not quite correct. Just because you can't detect antibodies doesn't mean you lack immunity.

B-cells can stop producing antibodies and reactivate production in response to an antigen. T-cell memory appears to be quite robust for coronaviruses (and this one in particular)

To establish a lack of durable antibody response, challenge trials would need to be done, where the host is challenged by the virus (or something that looks like the virus like it's spike protein). These trials have not been run.

We can only guess without data specific to SARS-COV-2, but for seasonal coronaviruses, antibodies disappear after ~6 months and reinfection with the same strain can occur after 1 year.

It isn't entirely irrelevant. If you can get reinfected but not get sick twice, it's as if we reached herd immunity at 100%.

And it's perfectly normal that antibodies don't stay in the bloodstream forever. The immune system remembers how to make them and can produce new ones when needed.

Reinfection is problematic for herd immunity strategy as it keeps the transmission rate , R high. This keeps the less healthy vulnerable.

This community refuses to acknowledge that Sweden’s strategy has merit.

Something recent that's been under-reported. The US, the country pulling an accidental Sweden, has seen a 33% decline in new cases since mid-July. The narrative is still that the US has done worse than any other developed country, but look at Spain and France. Both have surpassed their ~April peaks, have per capita new infection rates above the US.

How's Sweden's new case rates? Stable, and 1/4 of the US's.

The list of countries that have been able to maintain their low case counts is getting shorter, and the US is looking less exceptional in its response.

"Listen to the epidemiologists" only works for a bit. It turns out psychology was just as important.

France sent students back to school, and re-opened its universities, and allowed gatherings of 5,000 or more people, and did not require masks in public, or in workplaces, with predictable results.

Their response, and the results mirror that of the worst-performing US states.

In what sense? Lots of elderly people have died. Is that ethical?

Ten times the cases, and ten times the deaths of its neighbors, and a 8.6% drop in GDP in Q2.

Meanwhile, Norway lost 5.3% of its GDP, and Finland lost 4.9%.

Exactly which part of this strategy has merit?

Not to mention Sweden is more locked down than the US - _0_ gatherings over 50 people allowed. 0.

I'm astounded there's still people doing the 'debate me!' act about it, most gave up by July in the US, we had already clearly chose a more intense version of the Swedish 'strategy'

I'm amazed that smart people have been advocating Sweden's strategy. Sweden has a population of 10 million. New York alone has more people than that.

It's as if population size, distribution and density aren't even a consideration, let alone local practices.

It was also the strategy of South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Utah, and they seem to be doing a lot better in terms of both GDP hit and caseload than places like California and New York with heavy lockdowns.

Iowa has a projected 9.5% GDP hit. New York has a projected ~14% GDP hit, and due to its density and reliance on elevators and public transit, will of course have a higher case load, and require harsher measures to control the spread.

Half of the population of Iowa can fit in the 22 square miles of Manhattan. Oh, and infection rates in Iowa are climbing, whereas infection rates in New York peaked five months ago... And they are currently neck-and-neck in per-capita cases.

So, how did a mostly rural state get a case rate that's as bad as a state that packs half of its population into a single sardine-can of a city? Is their strategy actually working, if they are getting the same outcome, despite having a much easier set of starting conditions to deal with?

Meanwhile, in Canada, BC is projected to take a ~6% GDP hit... While having 1/10th the per-capita case load of Iowa, and higher population densities.

10M is a lot. It’s a population larger than the majority of US states and by far enough to draw conclusions from.

Sweden allows gatherings above 500 now (https://www.thelocal.se/20200827/breaking-sweden-to-allow-pu...). And it never forced business closures, which is way more open than most US states.

Because the virus isn't coming back in Sweden, whereas its neighbours are already experiencing a second wave. Sweden's argument was always that it was "front-loading" the infections, so over the long-term other countries would see a similar number of infections as they experienced multiple waves.

Plus they avoided the rise in depression and domestic violence that countries with lockdowns endured. As well as avoiding massive violations of human rights, although you leftists seem to care nothing about that.

  Because the virus isn't coming back in Sweden, whereas its neighbours are already experiencing a second wave. Sweden's argument was always that it was "front-loading" the infections, so over the long-term other countries would see a similar number of infections as they experienced multiple waves.

That doesn't appear to be what's happening.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

Also, Sweden didn't avoid an uptick in domestic violence.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iuGdja...

Even most 'high spread' countries have less than 10% of the population that have contracted the virus.

To get to herd immunity levels, millions of people would likely die.

Are you talking about antibodies? There are papers on T-cell immunity and clicks who've tested staff a month apart with no increase in antibody positive tests.

It's probably WELL over 10%. There are more ways our immune system can develop memory than just antibodies and a number of studies are showing that.

Sweden is nowhere close to achieving herd immunity (as everyone knows).

Then home come their case rate just keeps falling? And their death rate. And unlike the countries that locked down, they're not experiencing a second wave of cases.

Even in countries where a second wave is happening, it’s a wave of infection only, not deaths. There is not reason to be scared of a disease that don’t kill. International travel restrictions should be lifted. We don’t need to wait for a vaccine that might be more a dangerous than to virus it’s supposed to fight. Current practices in East-Asia have shown to be enough to handle the thing.

This is not universally true. In parts of California there was a jump in death rate reasonably close to a partial reopening. And has very slowly been trending downwards since they re-closed everything.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/

  There is not reason to be scared of a disease that don’t kill.

What about one that causes permanent lung and/or heart damage?

You mean like other viral infections, or bacterial pneumonia? As grave as the effects are, they are absolutely not unique to SARS-CoV-2.

Sure, and those grave effects are a 'reason'

The incidence of these effects can be a reason. Unfortunately there are no reliable data on how they are prevalent.

My point is insofar as one would/should fear death, they would/should fear a decent probability long term nonfatal consequences to some degree. Incomplete information doesn't obviate that.

Nonfatal=/=nothing to fear