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Old 16-04-2020, 11:08   #2207
Chris
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Re: Coronavirus

Quote:
Originally Posted by denphone View Post
Any possible cure will come when we have a workable vaccine end of...
A vaccine isn't a cure. At the population scale, it is a means of artificially inducing herd immunity. Herd immunity is the only way to keep a virus from moving freely through a population.

We can't say for sure that natural herd immunity will be possible with this Coronavirus; it might be susceptible to rapid mutation, thereby bypassing our acquired immune response, or it may be of a type that only provokes a weak and not very persistent immune response in humans. If either of those turns out to be the case, then an ongoing vaccination programme will be necessary, probably going on for years until we can induce immunity to new strains almost as fast as the virus can produce them.

On the other hand, we still do not yet have sufficient data to know if those things will happen. It is quite possible that we could get herd immunity within a year or two.

In any case, neither herd immunity nor a vaccine is a cure.
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