> We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes
HIV is so fundamentally different that it doesn't make sense to include it as a comparison here.
> there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market.
The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon. 143k deaths in the US already, and we likely haven't even hit 10% of the population being infected yet.
Treatments will help pull the death rate downwards, but without a vaccine we're likely looking at multiple hundreds of thousands more deaths.
Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. All vaccines are different; they're not one blanket thing. Smallpox vaccines are attenuated virus (a virus that has mutated to be benign in humans; in the case of Smallpox, the first vaccine by Jenner was injecting people with Horsepox).
Most Influenza vaccines are heat treated/inactivated virus.
In all cases, vaccines try to produce antibodies and force our immune systems to develop a memory for a virus we haven't actually been exposed to. As shown in the links above, this might not work at all for coronavirus.
To some extent, the actual interactions of vaccines, are somewhat opaque. This In A Nutshell video shows a very small part of the adaptive immune system, greatly simplified:
The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were.
If you graph fatalities on a logarithmic scale, you'll see we're already well past the inflection point in the US:
The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of over-counting. Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. All these people getting surgery after 3 months are required to get tested just for their surgery, and a positive antibody test counts as an active case, even if they're not sick or have the virus at all.
It's so bad in the UK they've stopped reporting fatality numbers due to issues with the data.
I know that all vaccines are different, the thing I take issue with is using HIV as evidence that a vaccine for this virus might take decades to develop, despite all the current evidence to the contrary.
> The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were.
At what point is the virus going to "run out of hosts to infect" or reach a point where "everyone develops an immunity"? Everything I've read from epidemiologists seems to indicate we're a long ways away from that. We're not going to get a free pass from herd immunity anytime soon (https://covid19-projections.com/us estimates that the US is at 8.4% total infection so far), and we can't count on it just burning itself out. It's a bad combination, where it's not deadly enough to quickly burn itself out like SARS/MERS, but has a death rate higher than something like the flu, and is very transmissible.
> The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of over-counting
I'm very skeptical of the over-counting claim, without evidence. And I don't think it's quite true to claim that fatalities are not going up. The 7-day rolling average of deaths in the US has been climbing since around July 5th.
> Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before.
SARS and MERS.
> Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19.
I'd like to see evidence that this has happened, that's it's not some freak outlier, and that it has any meaningful impact on the reported death toll. Looking at excess mortality, it looks like deaths have been under-reported, if anything. It's getting tiresome to see people trotting out the anecdote about someone getting in a car wreck and being counted as a CoVID-19 death.
> Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19.
In Colorado there was lawsuit over this, because there was a case of a college age man dying of alcohol poisoning but he tested positive for Covid-19 so was counted as a Covid-19 death per CDC regulations. So the Colorado Health Department now tracks two numbers: people that died with Covid-19 and people that died because of Covid-19. As of right now the first is 1,752 deaths and the second is 1,615 deaths. Statistically it's not a huge difference, you can see the numbers here:
These numbers aren't directly comparable. They're reported on different timescales, because determining cause of death takes longer than determining that someone who died had CoVID-19.
The UK got a 65k people over mortality over the last months, for 45k official COVID-19 victims. So if anything the UK is undercounting COVID-19 victims.
Nearly all countries are like this AFAICT the US coronavirus deaths figure is around 140k, but the full excess death figure is somewhere around 170k (it's difficult to find good figures, some are here - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm )
In many countries, e.g. France, excess mortality and COVID-19 victims match very closely. Sure there may have been more untreated cardiovascular events, but there were also a lot less accidents and it seems it evened out...
> It's so bad in the UK they've stopped reporting fatality numbers due to issues with the data.
If the UK where really serious about the actual covid death toll they should address the huge discrepancy between the reported covid deaths and the excess mortality during the pandemic. Not a good look for the UK.
Interestingly enough the weekly UK excess death figures went negative at the end of June, meaning less people died that week than in previous years. Presumably this is due to the huge number of deaths in care homes in previous weeks.
There is more to the immune system than antibody production. A lot of the focus is on antibody production, because it is easy to measure. T Cell responses, for instance, can be very durable for coronaviruses--for instance, people who recovered from SARS in 2003 still have a T Cell response when exposed to a protein from that virus (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/ne...).
>It's so bad in the UK they've stopped reporting fatality numbers due to issues with the data.
They were reported again today. They weren't stopped because they were bad but because there were descrepencies between the counting for each nation of the UK.
HIV is so fundamentally different that it doesn't make sense to include it as a comparison here.
> there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market.
The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon. 143k deaths in the US already, and we likely haven't even hit 10% of the population being infected yet.
Treatments will help pull the death rate downwards, but without a vaccine we're likely looking at multiple hundreds of thousands more deaths.