I am not a virologist, but based on my reading, in 100 years COVID will still be with us. At worst it will be the flu, and at best it will be just another strain of a cold.

COVID has the very helpful quality of being least impactful on the very young. As new children are born they will be exposed to COVID multiple times over their lives, to the point when they are at ages we now consider vulnerable, they likely will have developed as much resistance as one can have.

"If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless"

Note that even not vaccinated, the ultra large majority of people either are asymptomatic or don't get anything worst than a flu (which doesn't mean covid = flu in general)

We seem to have forgotten that the original concern with the virus was the fact that it saturated intensive care units in hospitals, and thus prevented people from getting proper care.

That’s the original acute concern. Long run we still don’t know if it will have effects on brain function etc. There are some disturbing lines of evidence on this front. For example the UK biobank showing grey matter loss post infection including in mild cases:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...

i remember this study, but i'm surprised we don't have more papers on the same topic since. It seemed like a pretty big news, and yet i don't hear people recommending mass-vaccination mention it.

Any idea why ?

My guess is it takes a while to do this sort of study. UK biobank was unusual in having such a large database of scans.

Vaccination should reduce the risks. But there was a nurses study that 19% of the breakthrough cases had lasting effects. So I would not expect vaccination to eliminate the risk if a breakthrough happens.

I recommend mass vax and this point is one of the main points I use. But I agree with you that sadly, this danger is not well known.

Which, unfortunately, is still relevant - as seen in Louisiana and Florida. A frank and honest admission by one of the physicians on Reddit was that most people who stay in ventilator for weeks have no path to recovery but families don’t let them go. Essentially COVID patients hold up the beds for a long time as well.

In places with high vaccination rates, to some extent, tracking new cases as positive test rates is fighting the last war.

We might also see the first batch of medicines appear in 2022, if we can successfully prevent ICU visits with effective medicines for starters, that would mean a lot to healthcare professionals worldwide.

Is there any actual development here? It's definitely not a given that we can do this.

There actually is!

Two studies in Brazil have shown a pretty significant reduction in hospitalizations in a RCT of fluvoxamine. More data obviously required.

Plus there has been more work on other treatments, but most are pretty expensive.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22619137/fluvoxamine-covi...

While obviously complicated, Pfizer is working on a promising medication and I know of a dutch trial using antibodies that’s starting a next phase.

>Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about.

It's a problem if you're one of the many people who, for whatever reason, can't be safely vaccinated.

Not that I am qualified for such a debate, but it's not clear to me that the risk of creating variants is greater than the risk of letting the virus run through the population unopposed. The variants so far seem to be variations of the same virus with similar risk profiles, and the vaccines seem to be mostly efficient against these variants.

For each variant we've given an alphabet to, like Delta, there are variants occurring from those - they seem to only give them a letter once it's a large enough step in mutation; I'm not sure of the actual labeling practices used.

But yes, I'm not qualified for the pinnacle of such a debate either, but those discussions aren't even happening - at least not in public which they need to be.

There are mutations that are occurring however just in vaccinated, that aren't occurring in the non-vaccinated, the virus mutating to escape the immunity of the vaccinations - which then makes those variants easier to spread to other vaccinated [and potentially easier to spread to unvaccinated as well]; UCSF recently released study of 1,300+ patients with COVID,78% had specific variants associated with vaccinated vs. 48% of unvaccinated having those same variants - various conclusions of possibilities could be made from that.

(Replying here since your original post is dead)

It's not that nobody's talking about it, it's just that people have done the research, and they've proven people like Dr. Montagnier wrong.

Why give air to people who keep saying things that are wrong? https://twitter.com/GKangInd/status/1397429770028158978