Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, August 8, 2020

This Seems Important

The most interesting aspect of Covid-19 has been the wide variation in how people respond to it. Basically, there are two ways to fight a virus - antibodies and T-cells. Antibodies typically fade with time, but T-cells have longer "memory."  Coronaviruses are fairly common, so maybe having some immunological experience with fighting other coronaviruses might lead to better results when exposed to this one.  

Also, in the article there is some evidence that wearing a mask leads to asymptomatic infection. The current death rate of US infections is fairly low. People are getting sick, but not dying (yet). Perhaps the masks are reducing the viral exposure and therefore leading to milder or asymptomatic cases. There's this:

Gandhi noted that in some outbreaks early in the pandemic in which most people did not wear masks, 15 percent of the infected were asymptomatic. But later on, when people began wearing masks, the rate of asymptomatic people was 40 to 45 percent.

That has a massive impact on our own plan to open school with universal, mandatory masking. 

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