Going Viral

Helen Bramwell of StatNews is an excellent writer about public health. Here she interviews a bunch of scientists to ask what surprised them about Covid19.  It ' s a long read, and I won ' t try to summarize it all, but a couple of points stand out.The first is that most experts originally thought, based on experience with other coronaviruses, that this one would be stable -- that it would not be able to mutate so as to avoid immunity from previous infections or vaccination. Therefore they believed that the pandemic would peak after a few months and we ' d enter an endemic phase. (You might remember those models from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showing a tapering off of new infections within a few months, at a time when no vaccine was available. They ought to be embarrassed but of course they aren ' t.) This turned out not to be true, On the contrary, this virus has an exceptional capacity to evolve and evade immunity. It ' s like influenza in this regard but unfortunately it ' s also more virulent, i.e. it has a greater likelihood of causing severe disease and death, and it can also cause long term disability. So it ' s definitely a bummer..The second is better news. The experts were surprised by how quickly effective vaccines were developed, and how many of them were successful. No, even the best of them aren ' t highly effective at preventing infection and transmission, but they are very effective at preventing severe disease. I would add on my own ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs