As a denizen of Twitter, I am seeing a few disturbing trends. Since the Orange turd had begun dissembling and looking for others to blame for his fuckups around the Novel Corona Virus pandemic, I am now seeing a new trend.
People who are MAGAts are asking: “What if we never find a vaccine that is effective for COVID-19?” I guess I should be thankful that they have stopped labeling it “Chinese” or “That Wuhan Virus”, but I suspect they are calling it by its formal name to disarm the wary.
While I am sure that they are hoping to pounce on any response to say “We should just open up the economy again …” that their Dear Leader is preparing to state.
The reality is a lot different. Viruses aren’t intelligent. They don’t have battle plans. They don’t regroup. They just infect, replicate, and then spread.
What happens if we are unable to create a vaccine with efficacy against this vaccine? Well, it will spread like wildfire through the population. It is very infectious, with an R of > 1, and the really terrifying facts are that even if you do eventually get sick, you often are spreading active virus for up to two weeks without knowing that you are.
Even more terrifying is the fact that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of all people infected show no symptoms. As in asymptomatic. That means that while you are feelin’ fine, doing shit, you are spreading the contagion to all your acquaintances, and odd people you get near.
So, in this case, where there is no vaccine, what happens? The world’s population will eventually attain what is called herd immunity. In essence, enough people have had the disease, and either succumbed (died) or recovered. If you have recovered, you will have antibodies in your blood stream that prevent you from getting it again.
If enough people have the antibodies, then future outbreaks will fizzle out. How many people are we talking? There is no concrete answer, but around 50% of the population is about where you see the herd immunity effect begin, and it fulling being effective at about 80 – 85%.
Sounds good right? Let’s just remove all restrictions, and let it wash over the world. Indeed, Boris Johnson.PM of the UK advocated just this. Until someone told him that before that happened almost a million Britons would perish from the COVID-19. (It was close to 2.2M in the USA)
Why is that? Well, for the US, we have about 330M (327.1M to be precise). 50% is thus about 165 million people. That is a lot. Let’s assume that the current fatality rate remains constant at about 1.2%. That is 1.98 million dead.
And that doesn’t take into account the uneven distribution of healthcare resources.
So, you better hope we find a safe, effective vaccine for COVID-19, because the alternative is pretty fucking awful.
And the MAGAts that are trying to play the “Gotcha” game here should be ashamed of themselves. They are truly terrible human beings for trying to promote the Baby Hands McGrifter’s incompetencies.
