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Heard of Immunity?

By January 21, 2022Commentary

The level of total immunity in Minnesota and the country is very, very high right now.  A huge percent of the population is vaccinated or has been infected or both.  I would guess there cannot be more than 10% to 15% of the population that has no immune response to CV-19, based on vax stats and seroprevalence surveys and estimates of detected and undetected infection ratios.  This Omicron wave has pumped numbers up to a very high level.  Remember when the “experts” told us that if we got to 70% or 80% infection the epidemic would be over?  I was astounded at those pronouncements because of the misunderstanding of adaptive immunity they evinced, coupled with the widespread and increasing use of oversensitive PCR and antigen tests.

So why isn’t it over despite such high levels of total immunity?  Because, for the 100th time, adaptive immunity does not and cannot stop exposure.  If people are exposed and there is constant testing, you will find “infections”, most of which have no clinical meaning.  Because the virus has a million reservoirs and a far greater ability to survive and travel in the air than we have understood or accepted.  Because population immunity does not mean there is no virus; it means that transmission and infections are very low and impose a low morbidity burden.  How do the experts not know this, or if they do, how can they be so bad at communicating and even worse at designing policies that take these basic facts into account.

If we only counted as “cases” those infections that had symptoms requiring, requiring, medical care, and we only counted as CV-19 hospitalizations those in which the primary reason for admission was CV-19 and the primary treatment was for CV-19, and we only count as CV-19 deaths those in which the actual cause of death was CV-19 disease; the epidemic is over now.  On those more rational parameters, what we have now is a typical or less than typical flu season, and that is how we count flu events.

Will the “experts” and politicians in charge acknowledge this?  Nope, too stubborn, too prideful, to ever admit making a mistake.  At least the British, while not saying they were wrong, dumped the CV-19 restrictions when they could see there was no reason to keep them.

Join the discussion 7 Comments

  • Rob says:

    I can’t think of anything that was handled sensibly by the powers that be during the pandemic. Not one! Doing the exact opposite of what they said would have been the smarter approach.

    And the truly frightening thing is that these were the responses that were PLANNED over several years by the CDC/Hopkins/NIH/Gates cartel. None of them should have a shred of credibility left.

  • Dave Begley says:

    Agree!

  • Lake Detective says:

    This synopsis: succinct, clear, informative. Thanks.

  • Mr. Rogers says:

    It will be nice to have the pandemic over. As you point out, it is also important to have reliable metrics to guide our decisions. Among the available statistics, the one least susceptible to manipulation (intentional or inadvertent) is the all-cause death rate. When that returns to normal, then we know that we have sufficient immunity to deal with COVID as just another pathogen. Unfortunately, we’re not there (yet). In a typical December, there are ~950 deaths/week in MN. This December, the number has been >1200 for the weeks where we have reasonably complete data (i.e., before Christmas). With luck, a combination of vaccine- and infection-mediated immunity will bring the number of deaths down to something closer to a typical influenza epidemic. But we’re not there yet. We’ll know a lot more in about a month, when the death certificates from the Dec/Jan omicron wave have been recorded and entered into the NCHS database. Until then, claims of victory will be like the ones Biden made in Afghanistan, illusions that come back to bite us.

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