Lots of people experienced stuff like “getting chickenpox and then gaining immunity,” so the idea that not getting any illnesses for a couple years during lockdown would result in us being resistant to fewer illnesses seems not at all preposterous.
Apparently general infection rates are still high, so it didn’t bear out. But preposterous? Not really…
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-medical-critical-...
The fact that it conceptually makes sense to a layperson is irrelevant in a truth-seeking context. Much for the same reason that a theory that Google functions by paid human labors manually assigning results to search queries they predict you will search ahead of time "making sense" to a layperson is meaningless in discovering how the system actually works.
> In general because your immune system has a finite memory for diseases and because
SARS-CoV-2 is linked to “an unusually high level of ‘indiscriminate’ killing of T cells,”6 says Leitner, adding that this observation is “reminiscent of” measles, which can cause immune amnesia by depleting memory B cells (a different type of immune cell), leaving people vulnerable to pathogens they were previously immune to.
Brazilian researchers found that covid-19 triggered a sharp rise in T cell exhaustion and cellular ageing.10 Although the comparator group was limited, the strongest effects were seen in CD8+ T cells, which suppress latent viruses such as EBV and VZV. These effects were seen even after mild infections.
> diseases tend to mutate faster when infecting larger number of people
> its more like the latter.
Using chickenpox as an example of people's common knowledge of immunity is inadvertently very funny here.
> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken
It's a symbiotic combination of that plus capital interests driving a narrative to achieve a desired outcome for our archaic consumption-based economy.
Both parties of capital have lots of blood on their hands, but according to them, they're "just doing what the people wanted."
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
> Immunity debt refers to a theoretical concept that describes a potential decline in immune system function following a period of reduced exposure to infectious diseases.
Is this the same concept you're referring to? I would hardly call that a proposterous hypothesis at face value. It's reminiscent of the generally-accepted "hygiene hypothesis", that lack of early childhood exposure to some germs causes poor immune response or even asthma later in life.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/consumers-biolo...
This page seems focused on RSV in particular, noting that in that specific case RSV seems to not have the beneficial effect of exposure to some other thing, yet still says it may have "seemed obvious" that it should have.
> The “hygiene hypothesis” is supported by epidemiologic studies demonstrating that allergic diseases and asthma are more likely to occur when the incidence and levels of endotoxin (bacterial lipopolysaccharide, or LPS) in the home are low. LPS is a bacterial molecule that stimulates and educates the immune system by triggering signals through a molecular “switch” called TLR4, which is found on certain immune system cells.
...
> It may seem obvious that, since both the RSV F protein and LPS signal through the same TLR4 “switch,” they both would educate the infant’s immune system in the same beneficial way. But that may not be the case.
Anecdotally, I played a lot more in the dirt as a young child than any of my children, and I had much more severe asthma and allergies than they have, including the one that contracted RSV as a two-week old infant and went on to get sick just as often as their two siblings.
If you're conversing with a conservative, you will often get a kneejerk block – clearly an immune response from an LLM disputing their beliefs over and over again.