This will very well be the moon shot of the virology community with a more focused effort, but I tend to agree that a vaccine is going to be difficult. The common cold is coronavirus and how long has mankind been looking for a solution to that? With respect to the EU and death rates; it's reasonable to correlate population density to death although I haven't seen such a chart.

"Common cold" is not "just" a coronavirus, or any other virus for that matter... it's a menagerie of many viruses, some corona, some rhino, plus who knows what else. Some of them arrive new on the scene, and others mutate over time. So too complicated to try to come up with a vaccine that covers all those bases, especially since it's not life-threatening. Since the flu IS life-threatening for some, and a significant nuisance for everyone, they come up with a best guess for each year and vaccinate against a handful of known strains (3-4).

Flu mutates much faster than COVID is likely to (different genetic mechanism, plus flu lives in a permanent feedback loop between peasants and livestock in Asia). There's no indication that COVID jumps from people to livestock, so once heard immunity and/or vaccination is achieved the human "playground" in which it can mutate should be reduced to almost nothing. So vaccine science should be able to stay ahead of this thing.

First off hope your son stays healthy through this and long past it.

But don't we already have an expectation of dictating other's actions to a degree as a part of living in a society? From (reasonably) obeying speed limits, to washing one's hands, to not randomly chucking rocks at people because you feel like is all a part of a social contract. Extending that during times of pandemic is perfectly reasonable to me. No, we can't force people to do the right thing all the time, but since we've moved on from being selfish heathens (well most of us) we should have by now figured out it isn't just about ourselves.

The trouble is with something as highly transmissible as this is, it's near impossible to know what our actions can cause downstream. Isolating those who we believe are high risk just isn't feasible, we can't seal up millions of people in isolation chambers for the foreseeable future. Just as we can't expect people to stay locked down forever, but a reasonable approach to combating this doesn't mean willy nilly opening it up and getting 'back to normal' overnight.

As I've mentioned previously, we're going to need to overhaul some things after this. From labor protections to guaranteed healthcare if we want to move past this and prevent things like this in the future the status quo can't remain.

Stop living in fear. Diving into a global depression is going to kill far more people than this disease.

Our fatality rate is lower than 3rd world countries, yes. I will give you that. We have good hospitals, medialcal equipment and Dr's.

What we do have is over 1 million confirmed cases. That sets us far apart from everyone else. China stopped cases at less than 100k. (I know a lot of people don't believe them, and I get that)

We have 4 to 5x as many cases as any other country. And we are opening back up before we see a solid decline in cases. I fear that we are reopening too soon and will make the problem worse again. I think we should have locked down harder and sooner and actually snuffed this out. I think that would have allowed us to get back to business sooner

My point being that scientists have been working on treatment to viral illness for some time and there's no reason to expect a miracle cure for COVID. There has been a lot of wishful thinking based on the increase in research, but to date there's no across the board solution. Can we agree that there's been no reduction of the virulence of COVID? Without an effective treatment what's your best suggestion to stop the spread? For states opening this week, I guess by Labor Day we'll know if that was brilliant or a failed gamble.

With respect to animals transmitting COVID, it's happening but not well understood. The inability to test humans makes it no surprise that little is known about infection rates in animals.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...g/animals.html

Well said, it’s embarrassing how dumb we look. The leader of the free world. Not just to the rest of the world but to each other. First was hoarding TP now trying to open it up when this is nowhere near any kind of acceptable containment. We have become a stupid arrogant nation with so much division.

And I had assumed most people are intelligent enough to not compare total numbers of a country with a 329M population with those of 20M population country.......


It's also ridiculous to think this is going to be "snuffed out" by just staying home.

You’d be wrong, worse, the error is made by someone touting science. Oops!

It’s pretty easy to see the US has the lowest deaths per million population of any EU country, which is the only real fact with the variances in testing and reporting standards.
GF

flu season 2017 - 2018 per CDC nearly 80,000 people died from the “flu”....and that’s WITH A VACCINE.....COVID 19 is flu like and it’s incredibly stupid to wreck the country over this.