So, way back in the dark ages of 2019, I read a brief article about a novel virus called SARS-CoV-2—what we commonly refer to as COVID-19. Friends of mine were already saying this wasn’t gonna be any worse than the flu, but I paid attention. I told them that if we didn’t take it seriously, the entire country would shut down.
I don’t claim to be a virologist or immunologist, but I listened in all my science classes, and I’ve read widely my entire life. Especially now that I write Sci-Fi.
A few months later, and the death rate from this flu-like virus proves to be ten times the worst flu epidemic, and I told everyone we would shut down the schools soon. Later, I said they wouldn’t open on time in September. A very intelligent friend told me things would get back to normal by Christmas of 2020, and I reminded him of human nature. My exact statement was “People are stupid, and we’re gonna see wave after wave of variations for years. He countered with “But viruses always mutate to lower virulence,” meaning they become less deadly with successive generations.
I say all the above in hope people reading will believe me when I write here that we haven’t seen the worst yet. While it’s true viruses become less deadly as they mutate, that’s with a normal life-cycle. What we are doing with this is definitely not normal. We could either let it run its course and burn itself out by everyone getting it and hence creating a modicum of herd immunity (not optimal because of the death rate) or we could vaccinate and take simple precautions and achieve the same result without the high number of deaths.
What we’ve chosen (and by we I mean the idiot anti-vaxers) is the worst possible path—limited vaccination and huge numbers of super-spreader events. From this, we’re going to get random mutations in selected populations, and some of these will be more virulent. If we keep this up, we may see a death rate rivaling the bubonic plague. I remind readers that the plague had a 13% mortality rate among treated patients, and a 50%-60% mortality rate for those untreated.
In short, please help us save the world. Mask up and get vaccinated, or us survivors get to divide up all your stuff when society collapses.
Feel free to comment below, but COVID misinformation will be deleted.
