What kind of hope were you holding if I may ask, that it's been crushed that many times already? My government (NL) has always been very clear that a vaccine would not be expected until late 2020/early 2021 at the earliest, and that we would have to cope until then.
Also, we haven't been treating the disease yet. We have gotten better at managing/alleviating the symptoms and relying on the body's own immune system to clear the infection. If this discovery allows for a more targeted treatment of the infection itself rather than its symptoms, it's actually very good news. But even then, it's going to take months before we can validate the efficacy of such a treatment.
> What kind of hope were you holding if I may ask, that it's been crushed that many times already?
Not the OP but the expectations were that in 6 months' time we would have gotten better at treating at least "some" of the disease. No-one knowledgeable enough expected a vaccine by this autumn but some people were hoping for a greatly increased standard of covid care in August 2020 compared to February 2020.
Re: the vaccine thing, I don't think that's logistically possible to give the vaccine to billions of people in less than a year (even a 50% covid vaccination rate for our species would mean administering 3.5-4 billion vaccines), so 2022 at the earliest looks like our best bet (hoping that we'd actually have the vaccine by early 2021). Looking at past vaccination campaigns I personally think that even a 3-5 year timeframe looks optimistic, but that's just me.
March or April compared to now seem to indicate we do have a greatly increased standard of care, resulting in a much higher infections per death ratio.
This isn't necessarily true - there is a implied assumption that the infections are still following the same distribution among people with different risk factors, but that isn't necessarily the case.
"Piper Gilbert Kerr (with pipes) alongside a penguin, March 1904"
Much as I disapprove of wiki vandals, I think this is a harmless injection of light humour into yet another dreary badly mangled wikipedia article (not the topic itself, just the way that wikipedians slowly squeeze the life out the written word revision by revision).
Yup. This must be why all the anti-maskers and COVID skeptics get all their news from Facebook. Truth is, Facebook isn't free either, you're just sacrificing your privacy for garbage.
