h2hq

This comment misses that false-positive and false-negative rates are wildly different.

The rapid tests are still quite useful because a positive test is very reliable and saves you several days of waiting for PCR results.

Perhaps the test results should be labeled "Yes, you have covid", and "meh, not sure".

I think the point is that rapid tests are performing significantly worse now on Omicron than they were for prior variants.

To be clear, there are plenty of virus vaccines that are lifelong.

It is unfortunate that the covid mutates as fast as influenza, but it was not a given at the beginning of the pandemic. Many scientists claimed that enveloped viruses were less likely to mutate, and that the covid vaccine would likely maintain immunizing effectiveness for years.

It was a disappointing outcome, not an obvious one.

Animals also get covid - so there's little hope of preventing future variants at all.

The majority of covid infections on Earth are not in humans at all.

Antibodies are not long term, ever. They always degrade in the blood system.

...but that's also not the only type of immune response that a vaccine generates.

Vaccines cause the creation of b-cells, which retain the memory of this virus antigen and will re-create antibodies if the virus infects the host.

b-cell immunity is persistent - for years, and probably decades. But because it is very hard to measure (it resides in your bone marrow), it is therefor not often reported on.

Having said that, it is hard to imagine that a 4th booster significantly increases the number of anti-covid b-cells - let alone ones that can impart immunity against the newer variants.

It cannot be randomized for a vaccine trial since the participants are all people who want to be vaccinated.

Your comment does not address the contradiction in the parent comment.

The contradiction is that two media outlets are stating opposite statements from the same source with regards to whether the 4th booster raises the amount of antibodies.

The primary reason we are fixated on faster-than-light travel, is because our lifespans are so tiny compared to the travel time to other stars.

This speaks more to our organic limitations than it does for the necessity of FTL travel.

An AI would have no issue taking 10,000 years to go to neighboring stars, nor 10 million years to "colonize" the entire galaxy.

I think the major limitation in our imagination about space travel is that organic beings will be the primary entities traveling the stars.