COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

Not sure at all. I’m hardly an expert in the math. An infectious disease doc explained it to me like this. Say you have a virus with an R0 of 2. Once you get to 50% of herd immunity R should be around 1.9, assuming nobody bothered to take any other action to reduce R like stay at home orders and mask mandates. @ 75% herd immunity you are down to an R of 1.7 which is still an exponential cluster fuck. @ 95% you are at 1.1 but your gonna have a huge overshoot coming as R falls off the cliff.

Edit: These numbers are just to illustrate the point. I don’t know what the precise R should be for a given % immunity.

I’m impressed that you had the gall to just completely make up equations, call it intuition, and not look up the most basic things about disease modeling.

You do not state the simple model correctly before you just kind of add on 1-%immune for whatever reason, forgetting that this is exponential growth. You need that exponent on R0 for time.

I’m not capable of deriving the equation I want mathematically. However, absolutely shit all in this situation is linear growth. Herd immunity is 1-1/R0, which means this relationship is exponential and will not have much effect on growth in the beginning, as cases will continue to grow exponentially

Log type function. Most of the benefit comes at the higher % immune.

1 Like

My pony broke its leg running over a log.

2 Likes

I looked into this some more and this makes sense. Goes to show the limitations of intuition

3 Likes

if this works covid will be a net positive on humanity.

https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-against-malaria-builds-on-pandemic-driven-rna-tech/

5 Likes

Was no one working on this before? People have been talking about mRNA vaccines for a while.

Yeah, I feel like this would have been developed COVID or no COVID. Maybe COVID allows them to develop it a bit faster, so could be some net lives saved. Maybe.

Think they’ve been “working on it” for decades, they weren’t sure how safe it was and urgency of COVID made them say fuck it, YOLO and roll the thing out. Who knows when they would have put it to use otherwise.

1 Like

I remember thinking something similar would happen when people started to develop anti-viral drugs for AIDS. And maybe it did but I don’t know enough to see what led to what over the last 40 years.

I think people were working on it, but the hundreds of billions/trillions of dollars that suddenly got thrown at it in the past year advanced the cause quite a bit.

2.5 million–all black and brown–people die from malaria every year: Insert shrugging unicode guy

2.5 million–mostly white–people die from covid: We’ve figured out mRNA vaccines!

2 Likes

This saRNA strategy is meaninfully distinct from the mRNA strategy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. This RNA encodes for two things, the gene of interest as well as Rep, which is apparently a primer-free RNA-templated RNA polymerase, that can amplify the RNA in question and thus produce more RNA and can be effective at lower initial dosages of RNA. That gives me a lot more safety heebie geebies than the mRNA vaccines, which only produce one thing, the antigen.

2 Likes

AstraZeneca got their start working on a (as yet unsuccessful) malaria vaccine.

1 Like

God dammit I’m just realizing I meant to put this in the covid thread

What are they saying about having maskless indoor sports, including wrestling?

hmmm any idea on why you would do that? My understanding is that rRNA was robust enough that you didn’t need an RNA polymerase. Maybe because they’re doing something specific with malaria?

also, thanks for the merge

Actually, the 1 - 1/R0 term is the mirror image of the (1 - % immune) term you’re questioning. When % immune equals the herd immunity percentage, new infections = past infections * R0 * (1 - (1 - /R0)) = past * R0 * (1/R0) = stable infection rate, and then declining after that as % immune increases. In the basic model, for a given level of active infections, population immunity is a linear reduction in the number of new cases.

1 Like

I’m not sure. I mean, to a certain extent, the proof is in the pudding: AstraZeneca hasn’t been successful with DNA incorporation followed by transcription, but this strategy is working. Perhaps you need just that much more production of a PMIF analog/fragment in order to be effective? I don’t have the opportunity to read the primary research on it at this point.

1 Like

Once Kurt Angle gets vaccinated we’re going to have 141 and 2/3% immunity

5 Likes