So if we wait around for a vaccine we're looking at 18 months mostly cooped up

[conuly]

Which is awful. Of course, other people are suggesting we say "Fuck it, let the geezers die" and just go back to "normal".

This is a terrible idea in many, many ways, but if I know one thing it is that there is no shortage of powerful people who like to promote terrible ideas. If the unthinkable happens and the awful plan ever gets put into place, about how long would it be until everybody was either immune or dead, do you think?

Comments

[elf]

Oh goody. Multiple types so people can get infected with a new one and then declare that All Science Is Fake News because they didn't get immunity as promised.

70% is... wow, that's low. That's a LOT of false negatives. A lot of false positives, too, although it's possible that the accuracy skews one way or the other.

I'm with you with "I am not the kind of med-science person who"... what I'd picked up was: There will be some immunity from getting it and surviving. How that works is still being studied. And it's not being studied with full resources and attention, because honestly, "what to do about people who don't currently have the disease" is a lower priority for the lab workers, who are working on "how to treat people who have it" and "how to make fewer people get it." Whether people do-or-don't have immunity as individuals is not yet a priority question.

It would be nice to know, esp. for medical workers who've gotten it. But it's not like their safety procedures can change if they're immune to one disease that's active in the hospital; they still need protections from everything else.

[erinptah]

If we're talking about PCR tests, I'm pretty sure there are no false positives. The test involves taking a sample and looking at it for viral RNA, and given that we can identify super-tiny mutations in this coronavirus's RNA, the idea of "finding something completely different but misidentifying it as this virus" seems...unlikely.

False negatives happen when you're carrying virus but not in the part that gets swabbed for the sample. That's a much easier problem to run into.

[fred_mouse]

I was assuming that the false negatives were happening at the swab stage, but it is useful to know that about PCR.

[fred_mouse]

Keep in mind that the false negative rate isn't going to tell you anything about the false negative rate. Given what is said below above, it sounds like false positives will be highly unlikely.