Notice this -— infections at home via close contacts tend to come with higher initial virus doses, in contrast to the smaller doses you might get from, say, a public door handle. As soon as your body notices an infection, it immediately tries to grow a response, while the virus tries to grow itself. From then on, it is a race to see which can grow biggest fastest. And the virus gets a big advantage in this race if its initial dose of infecting virus is larger.
Just as replacing accidental smallpox infections with deliberate low dose infections cut smallpox deaths by a factor of 10 to 30, a factor of 3-30 is plausible for Covid19 death rate cuts due to replacing accidental Covid19 infections with deliberate small dose infections.
Variolation has the virtue of being an honored American tradition.
In 1738, Charleston had a major smallpox outbreak. Eventually, there was a small effort at variolation, but it hadn’t gotten off the ground when the epidemic subsided. Twenty-two years later, in 1760, when smallpox appeared again, the town’s doctors were more open to variolation. Within 2 1/2 weeks, they’d variolated 6,000 of the town’s 8,000 residents, black and white alike.
An interesting historical footnote is that, when doctors were called to white patients, they sweated the patients – that is, they basically parboiled the patients, killing them. Blacks, ignored by the medical establishment, did better, especially if they were exposed to sunshine. Sunshine’s benefits appeared again with the Spanish Influence in 1918, making ludicrous today’s mandate that Americans must be trapped indoors.
Well the fact is that viruses like influenza die from Ultraviolet Radiation, that comes the direct sunlight.
“Notice this -— infections at home via close contacts tend to come with higher initial virus doses, in contrast to the smaller doses you might get from, say, a public door handle.”
I think it is possible that many people are getting their small doses and mild infections, from which they develop antibodies to the Wuhan Virus, from the random “public” infectious encounters, as opposed to the more than once repeated contact from someone who is infected that they have repeated close contact with - providing a larger viral load and a more severe infection.