While I do agree (of course) with what you say about how the immune system cope with covid I still do disagree that those people will be right. Covid is still not a flu and unless the next variant loses its ability to wreak havoc on multiple organs it won't ever be like the flu.
I was not much into team blue/team red but last time I said to an antivax in my family that I was still wearing a mask in public transport despite being vaccinated and she told me she wished for me to get covid so I would stop be scared of it so much I decided to drop my empathy level a bit.
This is quite infuriating. We had a pretty good window when we could have done something about this and we totally squandered it.
> You'd have to eradicate all the deer, mink and every species you don't know about that has been infected with it
How much transfer is there in animal populations? Do we have any idea of the size of the populations affected? How does this translate to the original spillover event? After all, there must have been an animal reservoir prior to someone in Wuhan becoming the index patient.
We do similar things for various other animal borne plagues with varying degrees of success but there is more than one example of a successful eradication.
I honestly doubt it. We could have blunted the impact but it was out of Wuhan and in Italy before any doctors in Wuhan even knew about it or suspected. We were never going to lock down the entire world the way that China locked down. Even if the Western world did, then what would your plan be for Africa? What about the slums of Bangladesh and other areas in SE Asia?
We fucked it all up and a lot of people died who didn't need to, but I doubt the virus was ever stoppable starting from the first day it was even suspected.
> How much transfer is there in animal populations? Do we have any idea of the size of the populations affected?
Estimates are that around 1/3rd of the white tailed deer are infected and it readily transmits from deer to deer. According to the CDC:
> Recent experimental research shows that many mammals, including cats, dogs, bank voles, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, mink, pigs, rabbits, racoon dogs, tree shrews, and white-tailed deer can be infected with the virus. Cats, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, racoon dogs, and white-tailed deer can also spread the infection to other animals of the same species in laboratory settings.
Deer so far are the only known species where it is spreading epidemically in them in the wild, but there's likely to be others. We probably don't even know exhaustively all the species in the world that it might infect through having similar enough ACE-2 receptors, and you can't miss one.
And we've never eradicated a virus that has an animal reservoir. Successful eradication is only something you can really attempt if you don't have an animal reservoir (or you need to do something about the reservoir like wiping out the mosquitoes that feed on humans).
Ok, I accept that.
The problem with COVID-19 as far as I understand it compared to SARS-CoV is that with COVID-19 you first become contagious and then you start showing symptoms. That tiny little difference, first the danger, then the warning instead of the other way around is why it is going to be impossible to eradicate it, and in fact why this was likely impossible from the beginning.
But we could have massively slowed down the initial transmission (at severe economic cost but probably not nearly as bad as what we have to contend with now), buying time to get those vaccines developed and out there resulting in a much smaller first wave and subsequently fewer lives lost and people severely ill.
> Even if the Western world did, then what would your plan be for Africa? What about the slums of Bangladesh and other areas in SE Asia?
Yes, this was a global problem from day #1. But that is something that we don't seem to universally recognize even today.
> Deer so far are the only known species where it is spreading epidemically in them in the wild, but there's likely to be others.
ok
> We probably don't even know exhaustively all the species in the world that it might infect through having similar enough ACE-2 receptors, and you can't miss one.
The parallels with computer security are interesting here. Indeed, a single species missed and it would be matter of time before the whole circus would start over again. But at this point in time I do not believe there is a viable path to controlling the virus in the human population.
> And we've never eradicated a virus that has an animal reservoir.
Ok.
We won't be taking precautions forever though. Reinfection and vaccine breaktrhoughs will be mild. T-cells and B-cells don't wane the same way Nabs does and protection against severe disease and hospitalization will be durable.
There will be loss of protection as you age, but we already have that with all the ILI illnesses and viruses that lead to pneumonia and death in old people.
There won't be some worse virus that somehow punches through T-cells, that's getting into the realm of science fiction. While there's about 20 epitopes on spike that need to change for the virus to escape Nabs there's a few thousand T-cell epitopes that would need to change and many of those will be concentrated in conserved regions of the genome that can't mutate or the virus stops working.
And once you have a mature B-cell response your body can quickly respond with NAbs to prevent the viremia that leads to multiorgan infection. In fact with vaccine boosters it seems we may already have this level of protection, even against Omicron, and the jury is of course still out as to how durable that is and it may be more durable than initial shots were.
Once the virus completes the vaccination campaign the hard way then the pandemic is over and the human race has a new cold/flu virus, and we should treat it like a cold/flu virus. It is also unlikely that we'll continue boosting with vaccines. We're unlikely to get enough people boosting with vaccines every year to make a dent in spread and boosting will mostly be confined to people over 65 and those who are immune compromised. We won't ever boost our way to zero virus.
The "its just a flu" people were dead wrong in 2020, but very soon they're going to be entirely right. That doesn't fit neatly into the way that we carve up our society into Team Blue / Team Red though so its difficult for a lot of people to understand.