Your Covid Cribsheet, Updated. Mysteries remain but one thing is known: We will be living with the virus indefinitely.

Since we reviewed the key knowables and predictables about Covid-19 in April, new points have emerged. Sewage studies and patient samples seem to show the virus was circulating in Europe and South America before an outbreak was officially recognized in Wuhan.

Lockdowns might or might not have been important contributors to suppressing eruptions that overwhelmed hospitals in the Chinese city, in New York, in Northern Italy. These episodes are not well understood. The hospitals themselves may have been a progenitor of local spikes. The mandatory closing of local businesses is hard to disentangle from the steps people were already taking to protect themselves.

Anybody—an individual, an entire country—can avoid communicable disease by avoiding contact with any carrier. This was an obvious starting point and yet has not proved useful or practicable information for many people and most countries. As Bloomberg News recently acknowledged in puzzling over why Italy is not currently experiencing a resurgence, experts remain stumped by “doubts over what exactly is effective.”

Lockdowns at least are universally understood, even by the media, not to be a solution to the virus. Governments need strategies for coping while still having an economy, so people can eat and sustain themselves and receive services. Something else to get realistic about: Large classes of people, like the young, are at relatively low risk. By the laws of human nature, they will start behaving as if the disease is not a serious threat to them personally.

Countries that apparently suppressed Covid with strong measures to keep people apart now are experiencing outbreaks once people no longer find it tolerable or acceptable to be kept apart. Epidemiologists, to reconcile a desire to have both minimal spread and an economy, pushed aggressive testing, tracing and confining as the magic pill.

After hearing over and over that the ‘black population’ would be disproportionally impacted by COVID-19... How come African countries have near ZERO cases and fatalities?

I heard that one country had 45 million people, 4000 cases and only 44 deaths.

How is that possible? No social distancing, no masks, people touching each other...

I heard mentioned that it was because they regularly were attacked by Malaria, and most people took malaria medication (Hydroxychloroquine).

If that is the case... I WOULD BE REALLY MAD!!!
Why did 200,000 had to die here in the USA if that was the fix? why did we had to close up the country?

The scamdemic has given new life to these rat despicable governors and mayors. Control the masses by any means necessary, this is thier perfect storm. Already some gov and mayors are claiming flu spikes surging in many urban areas coincidentally right before the election and a reason for them to close the polls and force mail in ballots. you just watch

The part of the title that says “We Will be living with the virus indefinitely” is really very silly.

OF COURSE WE WILL, not matter what.

The bug that caused the 1918-19 Spanish Flu Pandemic is still with us. It is one of the bugs included in what is collectively known as “seasonal flu”. So, yes, even the “Spanish Flu” is still with us.

ALL that happens with MOST deadly viruses is the contest between them and our remedies against them reaches a less deadly status quo we can live with, that’s all. We currently live with many live viruses in our system and with that knowledge is the realization that most of them are not killing us.

Some viruses, via survival of their hosts over thousands of generations, are the mutated/adapted viral descendants destined to survive by being not so deadly to their hosts.

Any virus that could kill all its hosts and survive would die with its last host.

If LIFE’S chief ambition is to survive, adapting to be less deadly to the majority of its hosts is how the majority of viruses we have managed to still be with us today.

The Spanish Flu was extremely deadly when it first arose. Of course (1) it has had mutations since then, and (2) our immune systems and (3) medicines have improved our defenses against it. The combination of all three of those things works in favor of us reaching a livable entente with most viruses, without ever eliminating them entirely.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

FOREVER.