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  1. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    FTR, they do publish vaccine efficacy against severe disease and death. AFAICT, even if you get infected post-vaccination your symptoms are likely ameliorated by the shot, compared to people who get infected without the vaccine. Recent example: a disease cluster in India, where 15 seniors at...
  2. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Antibody levels aren't identical to degree of immune protection -- the immune system has a memory, even once the antibodies have all gone the body can create them quickly again if it sees covid viruses. So you can't tell how long the acquired immunity lasts by doing an antibody test. I don't...
  3. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    This is actually great.
  4. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    So far it seems really unclear. There are a few known cases of reinfection, but given the attack rate we've seen in the US, if there were no immunity we should have many thousands right now and it'd be obvious. (Immunity is not binary; conventional immunity in this case might well be similar to...
  5. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Also, there's the technical quibble that Elon Musk already had the virus (and recovered), so probably wouldn't take a vaccine anyway.
  6. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    It's worth keeping in mind, re: long term consequences, that the highly visible anecdotes of people with multi-month recovery times are still low-probability events. The majority of people who catch it are still asymptomatic or have non-life-threatening illness that resolves over several weeks...
  7. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Further trivia: "vaccination" comes from Latin "vacca", "cow", since the original smallpox vaccine was in fact just an infection with a closely related but much less severe disease, cowpox, that conferred an immunity to both cowpox and smallpox. There's another word in English, "variolation"...
  8. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Bubonic plague caused periodic apocalyptic epidemics all over the world all throughout human history; what we call "the Black Death" was only the biggest one. E.g. Plague of Justinian, Plague of 1666, probably others I'm forgetting. I don't know whether it or smallpox were worse overall, but...
  9. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Stay away from political topics, please.
  10. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    The state of the health care system doesn't seem to be enormously relevant to COVID outcomes, except in worst-cases like northern Italy where the system's capacity is actually overwhelmed. (Which AFAICT hasn't been an issue either in Sweden or the UK.) Countries that can successfully shut down...
  11. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    The best info I've got on strains/mutations is this stuff. Not going to bother figuring out how well it fits with that A/B/C division.
  12. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    I dunno, can you do it while remaining at least six feet away from all other people?
  13. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    The lockdowns around here, at least, have a specific exemption for doing outdoor exercise.
  14. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    If we're doing this:
  15. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    This is somewhat true in that there are no (widely used) specific therapies, but modern supportive care is very, very good. If you're the only guy in the ICU, they can put you on ECMO and keep you alive through having no working lungs for days on end. (Plus of course all the less extreme options...
  16. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Probably not that high. You can have really alarming respiratory distress, that well merits hospitalization, which you will nonetheless survive without it. It's certainly true that you can expect fatality rates to rise if good healthcare is not available.
  17. alethiophile

    Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

    Note well: for this age range, still around one in seven people need hospitalization (meaning they were having respiratory failure that might well be fatal if untreated). It's far worse than the flu whoever you are, but it's true that the really alarming fatality rates are mostly among the elderly.
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