Our tiny
friend – the one that’s keeping us home all the time – is a member of a small
family; the coronavirus family, as you surely know already. A bunch of the family are the causes of the
common cold and thus aren’t too menacing.
Two others – SARS and MERS- are nasty, but rare. And then, of course, we have our friend,
SARS-CoV-2, which causes covid-19, our current, curse.
Well, if you
read any news at all you will know that our best bet for returning to something
like normal life is to develop “herd immunity”.
This requires that a very large proportion of the population acquire
personal immunity, either by having the disease and surviving, or getting a vaccine. Either way, the game plan is to build up a strike
force of antibodies in the blood sufficient to repel any future invasion of
SARS-CoV-2. Works with mumps and chicken
pox, so why not now?
Well, there
are two big problems here. With mumps
and chickenpox and many other diseases the antibodies stick around for a lifetime, but with the
existing coronavirus strands they don’t (SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t been tested
yet). In fact, they stick around for
only about a year. Also – virus love to
mutate; that’s why you need a flu shot every damned year. Maybe our current friend will do the same. Nobody knows.
All this is
explained better by Dr. Collins, below.
I find it discouraging, to say the least. Maybe our best hope is cure, not
prevention. And, of course, a mask a bar of soap and beer on the back deck - not in a pub!
