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raspberry-cream-pi t1_j2akpkl wrote

I suppose, at least, it would be helpful to identify any potentially dangerous mutations as early as possible.

Does letting it rip through a billion people increase the chances of mutation, or not since it can spread rapidly and without obstacle?

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ImmortalScientist t1_j2axw8s wrote

Think of every infected person as a new chance for the virus to mutate. There's likely to be tonnes of new variants emerge as a result of the huge surge in China.

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schwinnJV t1_j2cmx2m wrote

Probably closer to every infected cell in every infected person as a new chance, but yeah, not great no matter how you slice it

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closetedpencil t1_j2ehuzb wrote

Isn’t the likelihood of a mutation extremely small though? I’m not saying it’s unlikely here, just wondering since we went through all of 2020 with only two strains of Covid; Delta was in 2021

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LoucheFigure t1_j2bgzvo wrote

I think the faster the better. Think of it at the extreme end: imagine you could infect all Chinese in one day. You'd have a population with strong natural immunity, and any mutations would have very little chance. The more you space it out, the more chance for mutations to be passed along.

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Anditwashorrible t1_j2cbgio wrote

Hey, instead of downvoting you I figured I would try to explain why this is a bad idea.

  1. Suppose the mortality rate of COVID-19 is 1%. In other words, 1 out of every 100 people who catch COVID-19 dies. This seems like pretty decent odds. But China has 1.4 billion people. If everybody catches the disease, 1.4 billion divided by 100 is 14 million people dead from COVID. This would be a catastrophic death toll, about the lower end of estimates of how many people died in WW1 (16 million to 40 million). If I was running a country, I would want to find a way to protect my population from COVID that doesn't result in millions of people dying. By the way, COVID appears to have a mortality rate of 3-4%.

  2. Herd immunity would not necessarily be conferred against mutations. Mutations are different from the original strain; some are so different that they can evade our body's existing defense systems. This is why as the pandemic continues and more mutant variants arise, pharmaceutical companies are designing new vaccines, because the old vaccines are not as effective against new variants. Your body's immune system is no different. If you caught COVID near the beginning of the pandemic, your immune system would know how to identify and destroy that original strain. But it may not know how to do so against Omicron or any potential future variants, depending on how different they are. In other words, future mutations would still have just as much of a chance of infecting you and producing symptoms.

  3. Immunity does not mean that you cannot catch the disease or are immune to its effects. It means that your body can recognize and destroy the disease if it should enter your body to prevent further infection. But you can still catch and even potentially spread the disease; immunity just makes it very unlikely that you'll develop symptoms or die.

  4. It's important to space out how many people catch a disease at once because every country has a limited amount of hospitals, beds, and doctors. If people don't get adequate care while they are infected with the illness, more people than expected would die. See point 1.

Basically, your idea would result in a lot of dead people and wouldn't be future-proofed. To prevent people from dying from COVID, it would be best to prevent people from catching COVID.

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LoucheFigure t1_j2d0tf7 wrote

Thanks for engaging in a proper argument instead of being a drive-by shooter. I don't want to come across like I'm some covid conspiracist, my comment was simply from the perspective of speculating what might be coming for the rest of the world in light of what is happening -- not what I recommend the Chinese government should ideally have done. From a public health perspective, I agree with flattening the curve, but what's actually playing itself out is closer to "let it rip" after the goverment did an 180-degree turn. In an ideal world they would have taken 3 months to vaccinate the population again with mRNA vaccines bought from the West and taken some other transitory measures, but that's not what happened. In that sense it's a moot point how many people will die because they've already made this decision. It's still worth asking then what it will imply for us in terms of new variants.

Hopefully the death toll will be small, but they're in uncharted waters. Most of the population has already been vaccinated with Chinese-made vaccines that are still somewhat effective against severe disease, so maybe it'l be less than 1%. On the other hand, with the medical system collapsing it could also be more than 1%. They could have definitely gone for a softer transition, but it's almost as if the government is now wanting to teach the demonstrators a lesson, so they can hold it up as a lesson afterwards "look What happens when you listen to the mob". A lot of old people were never vaccinated simply because they didn't see the need with the constant testing and tight restrictions. Instead of letting it rip, the government could have at least done a big vaccination drive among them, and announced they'd let loose a month later. When you think of it, it's not that crazy that Xi did a hard turn on purpose so he can afterwards save face.

As to your point 2, there is hopefully some cross-variant immunity, but at this point we'll just have to see.

Happy new year!

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