Why Covid-19 Is Here to Stay, and Why You Shouldn't Worry About It

Immunity against infection from any of those coronaviruses doesn't last long, but protection against serious illness or death lasts longer so that when you get the same virus again in a year or two it isn't bad.

We now pretty much all get those four for the first time when we are children, and children are generally quite good at avoiding serious illness and death from them, so that first infection is not too bad.

Many researchers believe that the when these first showed up in humans and so there was a large adult population encountering them for the first time they probably did cause pandemics with widespread serious illness and death.

In the best case, COVID will be like that. We go from four coronaviruses that cause common colds that are annoying but rarely serious to five coronavirus that do so.

In the not as good case, it ends up like the flu. Generally quite a bit more annoying in most cases and in a few tens of thousands a year fatal. Maybe we also end up needing an annual vaccine booster shot for it like we do for flu.

There was an interesting article in The Atlantic today covering much of this [1].

PS: if you hit the paywall at the Atlantic but have an iOS device with Apple News+, open the link on that device and then hit the "share" icon and share with News+. The Atlantic is part of News+ and much of their paywalled content is included in News+. Same goes for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/how-we-l...

Safety is probability-based and thus continuous. We can reason about one action being less unsafe than something else, so the analysis is still relevant.

70% was their notional "herd immunity" number. It didn't have a really firm scientific grounding, but it was a useful target. They were hoping that people would get behind pushing it up to that number without coaxing, and then a combination of momentum and coaxing would push it well past.

They assumed that perhaps 10-20% would be just plain ornery about it, but given the hundreds of thousands of deaths, most would err on the side of getting it. That assumes it was generally seen as safe and effective, which means that they see lots of people getting it and contrasting that with the vast numbers of people dying.

Those assumptions turned out to be faulty, for a number of reasons. And that has caused them to flounder for alternative messaging.

Which I think reinforces my point about the bias of this source, actually: if they were genuinely worried about "safetyism," they would be interested in trying to figure out why so many otherwise-well-adjusted adults seem afraid to take this vaccine, afraid of other people "shedding," afraid of attacks on civil liberties if they wear a mask, afraid that businesses will go under, afraid of a New Normal, and so forth. They would be asking how to make people less afraid of all these things; as they say, progress is impossible without physical or emotional risk.

But they have concluded, a priori, that the problem is public health officials being too "safetyist," and they're interested only in research that supports that conclusion.

I do, actually, think both of you should be prohibited from participating in society if you refuse to take the vaccine, and I think that this position is at least as justifiable as anything CSPI believes. I do think that both of you are making bad cost-benefit analyses in refusing to take the vaccine, and this is a problem for society that should be fixed.

While there are sometimes misalignments, those things are effective ar shifting emotional ans legal blame elsewhere because they are perceived (and, at least in a stunningly wide range of fields, this is supported by massive empirical evidence for checklists) as being very effective at preventing avoidable accidents.