DuckQueue

DuckQueue t1_j2ws3t1 wrote

> So in the end with all those factors together, unless the efficacy is enough to create herd immunity it's going to be waves with not much differing total amount of cases.

You seem to be assuming that the disease will exhaust itself and run out of people to infect, but as the real world shows, that isn't generally how infectious diseases - especially ones this effective at escaping the immune system - work.

It's only meaningful to talk about the total number of cases up to a given point in time - if you're trying to talk about the total where the number of new infections permamently drops to 0 you're talking about circumstances that might apply to some newly-arising zoonotic diseases but decidedly does not apply to the disease we're talking about.

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DuckQueue t1_j2wpnl4 wrote

> It's just few generations more.

Like... twice as many. Yes, not multiple orders of magnitude but still enough to make a huge difference, especially when you account for the other factors I mentioned.

And that still wouldn't account for how diseases actually spread in real populations, where not everyone has an equal chance of being exposed to any given other person. There's a reason actual models of the spread of disease are much more complex than the model you're providing. And a reason why observational estimates of the R0 for COVID haven't been appreciably declining over time.

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DuckQueue t1_j2wnm2i wrote

> After each generation you should adapt the number of potential vulnerable candidates compared to what initial R had.

In the abstract your point isn't wrong, but in the real world population sizes are much larger, resistance is imperfect to begin with, mutation occurs, and we're talking about a disease where previous infection doesn't confer a high degree of resistance that persists over the long-term - like COVID - so that isn't going to have nearly as large an impact as you're suggesting with your example.

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DuckQueue t1_j2s4rpe wrote

  1. Colds and flu have been around infecting humans for centuries or more, which means there is a huge amount of genetic variation to start with. That makes it a lot harder to create a vaccine which is highly effective against all their already-existing variations, which makes it easier for a variant to arise which escapes immune protection.

  2. COVID isn't an influenzavirus at all. FFS, influenza is a segmented negative-sense RNA virus while coronavirus is a positive-sense, non-segmented RNA virus.

  3. Not all viruses are equivalent in terms of genetic diversity and mutation rates.

  4. COVID wasn't bioengineered

  5. The original COVID vaccines are less effective against the newest strains, not ineffective.

Basically, almost everything you said was completely wrong.

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DuckQueue t1_j2s3u5g wrote

> In the wild, graphing cases, it doesn't matter at all

This is wholly incorrect.

If you have a single case of a disease with an r0 of 2, after 20 generations of transmission you've got 2^20 - or just over 1 million cases.

If you reduce r0 by 22%, after that same 20 generations you have 1.56^20 - about 7000 - cases.

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