I don’t think we ever could’ve wiped out COVID once it left Wuhan, that’s just not the way these vaccines work. In most cases you’ll still get the disease and be a carrier (and thus spread it), but you’ll spread it more slowly because your symptoms are much less severe. It’s a harm reduction strategy, not an eradication strategy.
That said, they absolutely should’ve been made widely available because of the harm reduction nature of the vaccines.
Here’s an article about how COVID will likely never be eradicated from 2020. The issue isn’t our response (which was woefully insufficient), but the actual way the virus family works. It’s not like smallpox or polio, it’s more like the various viruses that make up the “common cold.” The more likely scenario is for it to mutate into something like the common cold that’s less deadly but quite infectious.
The reason that covid would benefit from evolving to be less deadly is that people don’t want a deadly disease and take steps to prevent it. But people don’t care about long covid, and that means there isn’t an evolutionary pressure for long covid to get less severe. I think covid is going to be our generation’s equivalent to lead poisoning until we take it seriously.
You can think what you like, but the scientific literature says otherwise.
Diseases get less severe over time because, it turns out, the more deadly ones have a lower chance of spreading vs less deadly ones. Virus strains that inhibit the host less have a longer time in contact with potential new hosts spread faster than the ones that have severe, early-onset symptoms. So without human intervention, viruses trend toward being less severe.
Long COVID is a separate thing, any I’m honestly not that knowledgeable on it. I personally think we need a better understanding of what’s going on because I’m not convinced COVID actually caused all of those cases, and maybe not even a majority. I think doctors have just been throwing the label at it when there’s not a ready explanation and the patient had COVID recently. Vaccines do seem effective at reducing the chances of that diagnosis though, which makes sense since they’re designed to reduce the severity of the disease.
I don’t think we ever could’ve wiped out COVID once it left Wuhan, that’s just not the way these vaccines work. In most cases you’ll still get the disease and be a carrier (and thus spread it), but you’ll spread it more slowly because your symptoms are much less severe. It’s a harm reduction strategy, not an eradication strategy.
That said, they absolutely should’ve been made widely available because of the harm reduction nature of the vaccines.
Here’s an article about how COVID will likely never be eradicated from 2020. The issue isn’t our response (which was woefully insufficient), but the actual way the virus family works. It’s not like smallpox or polio, it’s more like the various viruses that make up the “common cold.” The more likely scenario is for it to mutate into something like the common cold that’s less deadly but quite infectious.
The reason that covid would benefit from evolving to be less deadly is that people don’t want a deadly disease and take steps to prevent it. But people don’t care about long covid, and that means there isn’t an evolutionary pressure for long covid to get less severe. I think covid is going to be our generation’s equivalent to lead poisoning until we take it seriously.
You can think what you like, but the scientific literature says otherwise.
Diseases get less severe over time because, it turns out, the more deadly ones have a lower chance of spreading vs less deadly ones. Virus strains that inhibit the host less have a longer time in contact with potential new hosts spread faster than the ones that have severe, early-onset symptoms. So without human intervention, viruses trend toward being less severe.
Long COVID is a separate thing, any I’m honestly not that knowledgeable on it. I personally think we need a better understanding of what’s going on because I’m not convinced COVID actually caused all of those cases, and maybe not even a majority. I think doctors have just been throwing the label at it when there’s not a ready explanation and the patient had COVID recently. Vaccines do seem effective at reducing the chances of that diagnosis though, which makes sense since they’re designed to reduce the severity of the disease.