> like we have never ever in history managed

Smallpox would like a word.

Polio, too, for the most part.

Sorry if I could have worded it more clearly - I meant that we have never successfully eradicated a member of the coronavirus family. If we have, I appreciate a correction, preferably with a source. Reread my comment and I think this will be clear

> I meant that we have never successfully eradicated a member of the coronavirus family.

The last case of SARS-CoV-1 was in 2004 and the virus is considered eradicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

COVID is different in that it appears to have numerous animals it can live in. It's one thing to lock down people, but another entirely to lockdown animals.

Those two took decades to eradicate, we won't be able to keep the Earth's population on lockdown/no-lockdown cycles for that long.

We didn't keep the Earth's population on lockdown for the centuries/millenia before those diseases were brought under control.

That’s a goalpost move, and a matter of logistics, not outright impossibility.

SARS and MERS as well, which is notably more relevant. These don't exist anymore.

MERS hasn't been eradicated. There are animal hosts, mainly camels, and people occasionally still get infected.

A big change is that there is vaccine production capacity now, and the new vaccines can go through an approval process like is used for annual flu shots, meaning a new vaccine can start mass production in a few months vs the (very quick) year that it took this time.

A year ago there wasn't much more than experimental capacity to make mRNA vaccines. Now we are at tens of millions of doses a month and scaling up.

Actually much faster than months. MRNA-based vaccines can be brewed up in days to weeks.

The approval of the update adds some time. I guess you can be manufacturing at the start of that.

Updates are likely to be fairly streamlined, though; we already do this for the annual flu shot.

Lockdown is required when there is a risk of more paitents from an infectious disease than there are beds. Lockdown isn't the purpose, the purpose is to stop the number of new paitents requiring hospital from outnumbering the number of paitents leaving hospital (either walking or in a bodybag)

When was the last last time we had a disease that spread this quickly and caused this many hospitalisations, on a global scale?

even CA is lifting their stay at home order. I think the political costs of these hobby authoritarian regimes are finally getting too expensive.

The lockdowns are created by states and are political. If their goal has been archived, they can be lifted.

If you ignore places like Australia that locked down hard and early. Melbourne experienced a near total 3 month lockdown for example. The result? Pretty much zero local cases now and life back to normal, sans international travel.

Coronavirus will naturally evolve into the attraction basin for viruses of its type, which is the common cold: https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article248455480.htm...

It's already well on its way, from what I can gather.

One frustrating aspect of the reporting for me is people talking about "more infectious" variants without describing whether or not they are more or less dangerous. In general, the virus putting more work into being infectious is good news; it generally comes at the cost of being less dangerous in other ways as it hyper-optimizes into replication rather than anything else. We should expect and want to hear about "more infectious" variants, which double as natural vaccines to some extent against other less infectious, more dangerous strains still using the same external protiens.

There's a substantial lag, though, between finding out how infectious a variant is and how deadly it is (AIUI the rough averages are 2 weeks from infection to hospitalization and another 2 weeks from hospitalization to deaths, but that might have changed). That means that the data on how infectious a variant is becomes available ~1month ahead of information about how dangerous it is. Have we even had confirmed spread of these variants for a month?

BBC’s _More or Less_ did a bit on this. 70% more deadly (per person) would actually be better than 70% more infectious. Deaths increase linearly with deadliness of virus, but they increase exponentially with infectiousness.

Say the current mortality rate is 2% and each infected person passes on the disease to one other after a week, then stops being infectious. If 100 people have the virus in week 0, after 10 weeks 1000 people will have had the virus and 20 will have died.

Increase the death rate by 70% and you’d have 34 deaths instead. Increase the transmission rate by 70%, and you’d have 170 people newly infected in week 1, then 289 in week 2, totalling 285,000 infected people, of which 2% die. That’s now 570 deaths.

Obviously the numbers can all be changed somewhat depending on treatment, or whether you expect everyone to be infected at some point anyway, but the takeaway is that more deadly is not necessarily worse than more infectious.

Factor of 10 failure: 28,500 infections, 57 deaths

There is some talk that it also _is_ deadly. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/new-uk-covid-v...

It may be, but that article is also hedging quite a bit.

People have a hard time with this intuitively, because we probably live under the weakest selection pressure in the history of planet Earth, but it's vicious down there. Viruses are to a large extent playing a zero-sum game. If they get better at one thing, it almost has to come at the cost of something else, because they've already got all the knobs cranked up as high as they will go just to survive and they don't have a spare energy budget just lying around to put into other things without taking away from something else.

It's not impossible that some mutation was made that made it more infectious and more deadly... but it's a long enough shot that I'd consider the likelihood of incomplete early information and incentives that some parties have to amp up the danger in the presence of such uncertainty higher. Viruses do not routinely become more infectious and more deadly. If they did, we'd all be long dead. The evolution gradient tilts strongly away from that.

Very true, especially when you consider that a more deadly variant is highly likely to be associated with things like higher viral load, worse symptoms, and faster symptom onset. A virus that kills twice as many people will likely be harmful for twice as many people -- giving the virus fewer asymptomatic hosts that go around spreading without even knowing it.

It's more likely to go the other way; some derpy mutation that reduces viral load, slows incubation, reduces symptoms, makes more super-spreaders.

The virus exists in multiple species. It may be perfectly fine in bats and reproduce without killing the bat. In humans, however, it kills.

People need to stop reading these articles and start exercising. If this virus hit 40 years ago when hardly no one was obese this virus wouldn't even be a thing.

"30% more deadly" means that only 99.6% of people survive it rather than 99.7%. Still not ebolapocalypse.