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BBfanboy -> RE: OT: Corona virus (3/1/2020 6:35:59 PM)
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ORIGINAL: warspite1
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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy
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ORIGINAL: witpqs
My reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, is that testing will not stop worldwide spread of COVID-19, it will help with identifying those who catch it and are most vulnerable, thereby can benefit from most aggressive treatment.
Most of what I've heard about vaccines is a year is about the best case, usually a couple of years. Maybe some of the recent advances plus the priority of this situation will allow them to do it more quickly in this case. But, it's also my understanding that some viruses have simply never had a successful vaccine created against them.
I think we can do better than one year. During the Ebola outbreak, worldwide Level 4 labs began researching ways to deal with it. Winnipeg Federal Lab came up with one of the first, partially effective vaccines in about two months. The testing period was waived as the need was dire, so the site of the outbreak became the testing ground and quickly returned results indicating the vaccine greatly reduced mortality among those who subsequently contracted the disease - i.e., they had higher resistance.
To be fair, the lab had been working on Ebola and Marburg viruses for years so they had some idea of how to produce a vaccine targeting that sort of virus. The COVID-19 is "new" in it's detail, but still based on the Coronavirus family which we have seen before. We are not starting from absolute 0 in our research.
And maybe the virus itself will become diluted, interacting with other viruses to make it much less potent. My guess is that the 1918-1919 flu virus did something like that.
warspite1
I thought the second attack was stronger than the first? Or did I remember wrong?
It was - I watched a TV documentary on that flu last night. But after late 1919 it suddenly waned and disappeared. They did not suggest the dilution theory, but it was all I could think of for that result.
The interesting theory in the documentary (supported by lots of correlational evidence around times and places) was that the flu started in rural Kansas in 1916 from wild sources. A local doctor noted the high mortality rate for this flu and wrote letters to the appropriate authorities but they were ignored. Because people didn't travel much at that time it remained local until 1917 when the US Army had to raise an army to send to France and built a Camp nearby for training recruits. Contact with the local populace resulted in the Camp also being affected - as many as a third of the recruits were sick and many died.
Alarms were sent to Washington about this but the first drafts of recruits were already on troop ships headed for France. Troop ships are great environments for spreading disease so there were a lot of sick troops discharged onto French soil and hurried to the front. Woodrow Wilson had to decide whether to continue sending troops but he had sketchy and contradictory information, so he continued to send them.
Meanwhile a new agency had been set up to coordinate War propaganda in the US and it decided the news about the virus in the US would hurt recruiting so it suppressed it, going so far as to threaten one newspaper editor with treason charges for printing a story about the outbreak. Since Spain was not involved in the war it was one of the few countries that printed factual information about the flu. This is when the rumor started that the virus was Spanish in origin. It's not hard to see how secrecy and misinformation helped spread the problem.
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