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It's about the initial infection's virus load the immune system has to cope with. This is, by research, the main factor for severeness of Covid19.
Secondary, how effective the individual immune system is working against viruses.
Additionally, the virus floats, bound to aerosols. Influenza is falling to the ground pretty quickly, compared to SARS-CoV-2.
Make your own judgement based on these factors.
Based on my own observations the above is pretty much the best we know today.
I even think most of us have meanwhile had contact with the virus in very small loads in one form or another.
Even worse, it seems that positive individuals without symptoms don't develop antibodies. I leave it up to research and science if most of these were false positives, but it seems kinda obvious. Otherwise: good bye, herd immunity.
I have no medical background and I don't claim to know anything, but I do think this has a lot of implications to a possible vaccine too regarding how long it is effective and how much it is effective at all. With regard to this I recommend the below opinion piece that appeared a few days ago in NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/opinion/covid-vaccine-coronavirus.htmlIf you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its serious complications?
The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases.
But that’s not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the problem.
...
Then again, a vaccine that has to be administered again every year sounds like a great business opportunity and might explain for some of the enthusiasm that companies previously not being interested in vaccine business for this field now show.
I recognized that i started to get extremely fed up about "Corona" discussion in general. Not only the mask-defenders, also the weak conspiracy minded and selfish "we don't need the weak and old, so let em die"- type. Everything. It seems like constantly arguing is making everything social-related worse. And it sticks out of my ass already.
I couldn't eat as much as i'd like to vomit. I hope i can find my way out of this depressive episode soon, without being dependent on people becoming SANE again, if they ever were. But this time, with the flu season coming, it's likely going to boil up to the point where everybody hates everybody else. Or is it just me?
EDITed some minor things.
I see a lot of latent aggression, I witness this everywhere where people have to get along from groceries over bank counters to traffic. Never in my life I've seen so many unconcentrated and aggressive drivers on the streets (no matter on what kind of vehicles). I believe this is owed to the fact that we are not used so much to deal with unknown things and we actually still know literally nothing about that virus yet. Whenever some new fragment of knowledge appears, every side of the bespoken polarized parties tries to use it and make it fit for their agenda. It could well end up badly in things like wars and quickly escalating conflicts.
Also the tendency of mankind to solve complex problems with simple solutions doesn't help here, speak about about black and white vs scales of gray.
Since nobody asked, here is what I think could possibly happen:
Vaccines that protect you from infection and/or severly getting ill and which will give you live long immunity will not arrive in the next years.
I have more hopes that some drug will become available that helps in cases developing severe symptoms so that it won't end deadly. Meanwhile the virus could become less and less dangerous but even more contagious through the RedQueen effect caused by our increased hygiene, social distancing, masks, stay at home, etc. basically all we try to curfew it. My idea being that we catch and isolate the people with heavy symptoms quickly but those with no or very light symptoms will keep spreading it in office, family, pubs etc. So the less severe versions/mutation of Corona will prevail. This could result in the virus becoming more of a nuisance than the danger it is now as its ultimate goal is surviving and spreading.
It will probably become what AIDS was in the 80s, it will change our ways of socially interacting permanently and in a non-reversible way (though AIDS only affected one specific
genital social interaction, Corona affects most of them).
Thinking positive and appreciating all the luxury (roof over your head, food on the table, being healthy, having somebody to love etc. and most importantly having some corn in your cold wallet) we - or most of us - have is more important than ever for not going totally bananas in these times.
I firmly believe that we have been so massively conditioned by our current system relying on ever-growing consumption, that wealth, life situations, buying power and everything we perceive as positive in our lifes can be expected to be constantly improving and expanding that we have troubles accepting when things develop in the other direction and we have no simple answers for it to get quickly back on our track growing our wealth and expanding our fun.
That said, I still think if we just needed to have a worldwide catastrophic "problem" in 2020, we actually got off lucky with this flu stuff. I bet a nuclear winter after China, Russia, USA lost their shit wouldn't be even half the fun of Corona. A small asteroid hitting earth (or even better breaking up in atmosphere and hitting multiple places) would make look Corona pale too. Even when thinking about a pandemic, it could be worse, think about Ebola, or even better some zombie virus (ok, I am getting of the rails here, but I for one still hope for a zombie apocalypse so that I can finally mount the gun turret on my cars roof).
Not playing down what we have right now, but trying to inspire/incite some "it could be much worse" positive thinking and group hugging desires..