Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Get Vaccinated, It's a Winning Strategy

 If they are still survivors, I'm not sue getting vaccinated at this point is going to offer a lot of protection to the individual but a lot to society.  The omicron variant has been sweeping through the country but tends to have more mild symptoms.  It can still kill you but the decline in infections makes me think it has created a certain amount of herd immunity.

That is until the next variant arises, and that is virtually guaranteed to happen.  When there is as many cases as we have one virus mutation somewhere will manage to replicate and spread.  This is natural selection and the proof of evolution some have questioned.  Survival of the fittest, for a virus, means replicating better than the other versions.

The good news is that this is likely to happen in the Omicron Subset which is pretty dominant right now and while the manner of infection might change, most of its other features probably won't.  There is always the chance of a mutation that increases infection rates and is much more deadly but that is not the most probable outcome.

Those two outcomes are a bit contradictory.  The more a variant causes serious illness or death in its victims the more likely it will be isolated and quarantined reducing its ability to spread and become dominant.  The less it causes identifiable and threatening symptoms the more likely it can spread.  

Protecting yourself and others by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask can help reduce the number of cases and the number of variants.  It certainly reduces the severity of infections per the data.


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