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A comment on The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means. Parent comment

Re:The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means by nradov on Friday February 19, 2021 @03:00PM (#26197362)
Elimination is not feasible, although vaccination can help a lot. There is no real evidence that 5% of the population will become disabled. Some people do get reinfected but those cases typically suffer less severe symptoms.

SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to HCoV-OC43, another endemic betacoronavirus. There is strong circumstantial evidence that OC43 caused the 1889 pandemic which killed around 0.06% of the world population. Now most of us get infected with OC43 as children and build up a level of immunity which protects us later in life, but it can still kill frail and elderly patients.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

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Re:The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means by Viliam1234 on Friday February 19, 2021 @03:53PM (#26197905)
> Elimination is not feasible

According to the ancient legends, our ancestors have eliminated smallpox planet-wide. Too bad their awesome skills are forever lost in history.

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Re:The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means by nicoburns on Friday February 19, 2021 @04:11PM (#26198076)
Some viruses mutate more quickly/easily than others, and are thus much harder to eliminate than others.
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Re:The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means by foolmeonce on Friday February 19, 2021 @04:55PM (#26198534)
We could now reduce the development cycle to weeks and run a vaccination to less people than a clinical trial. That would be less risky than taking longer and needing to vaccinate 8 billion people with a vaccine.
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