Have You Heard (Herd)?


Have you heard about the college students in Alabama who are having “Covid parties,” and the first person to prove that he/she got the Covid virus won the pool money! I can hear the rumblings about those Alabamians not being the sharpest knives in the drawer! (Even though I do not know anyone from Alabama, I did drive through Tuscaloosa, Alabama once.)

But before rushing to judgement, should we think about what they are actually doing? It seems to me that they are making a trade – probably getting a virus that has a very low risk for their age group in exchange for a chance to act like normal college students . . . Go to parties. Go to football games. Go to class, etc., as once they are infected the chance of them getting the virus again is minuscule.

On second thought maybe they are sharper knives than we are giving them credit for!

Lately California is all a-buzz that the coronavirus  infections are “surging!” Of course, this must be a terrible thing . . . even though the death toll with this “surge” is nothing like it was back in April. In fact the present daily and weekly mortality is quite low. Could that be because now much younger people are getting infected? If that is indeed the case, could it be that a lot of these recent infections are in fact a good thing? 

Snicker, if you must, but there is such a thing as “herd immunity,” which in essence means that as a certain percent of the population gets this viral infection, then the remainder of the herd will be relatively protected. In the beginning of this pandemic, it was estimated that seventy percent of the population needed to be infected to achieve herd immunity, however recently some have estimated that this number may be closer to fifty percent.

Back to these silly college students. If an effective vaccine is developed, these low-risk college students will be at the very end of the priority line, so maybe their “Covid parties” are not so dumb after all!

(FYI: in my upcoming book, an entire town decides that having “Covid parties” is the only way out of their lockdown and its consequent economic debacle!)

7/10/20

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