There are people out there, many of them Democrat leaders, that believe the key to defeating the Wuhan Coronavirus is to wait until we get a vaccine, or sequester ourselves away in hiding until the virus runs out of hosts to infect and disappears.
Having a cure for COVID-19 is a nice thought, but the fact is, the Rona is here to stay. Vaccines may help, but it won’t eradicate a virus so widespread. Like the flu, it’s here to stay. Those looking for their best chance to defeat the virus is now the idea that was considered the most reckless move at the beginning by the mainstream public.
Herd immunity was suggested by a few figures from the beginning and they were called mad for it. Even in the beginning, I wasn’t exactly sure if they were wrong. Even given the unknowns about the virus, we knew that it had a high survivability rate, and testing only seemed to make that number rise. In fact, it was testing that continuously showed us two things. One, that this virus was highly contagious and widespread, and two, that you’ll hardly notice you have it.
My colleague Alex Parker recently covered some commentary on this that I couldn’t help but love despite the fact that it was delivered by a person I really don’t. Bill Maher seemed to sum up how we should approach situations like the one we’ve been in for a while now well:
“I worry that the last two months…have given people the idea that the way for humans to win our million-year war with microbes is to avoid them completely. And I’m here to tell you: You can’t. The key to beating COVID isn’t dining through glass or never going to a concert or a ball game again. It’s your immune system.”
“You hear people say, ‘COVID-19 is a new virus, so the immune system doesn’t know how to handle it. [Baloney]. Of course it does. That’s why the vast majority of people who’ve had it either recovered or didn’t even know they had it. What do you think did that? The human immune system.”
It’s a simple message but a very poignant one. We had the tools to defeat the virus all along. We didn’t and don’t need a vaccine. We already have the most dangerous weapon to viruses, bacteria, and more in our bodies already. In fact, our immune systems were so effective that many of us were killing the virus and we didn’t even know it.
This means that the closest we’ll come to a cure for the virus is confronting it head-on, not hiding from it.
As always, I want to impress that we absolutely have to make sure that those who are susceptible to the aspects of the virus should be kept safe. The sick and elderly should be placed in areas where the virus cannot make its way to them. However, sending everyone else into hiding is like decommissioning your army as the enemy advances on your land. We shouldn’t have sent ourselves into lockdown, we should have sent ourselves out into the world and dealt with it like Americans.
But we didn’t. We hid. At first, it may have been the wise thing to do but even as our data changed, we didn’t. Those who resisted the lockdown efforts were either punished in the court of law or the court of public opinion. The mainstream view was that you either obeyed your politicians, hid away, and waited, or you were an idiot.
Yet more and more we see that those who are willing to brave the virus are the ones in the right.
The way forward is clear. It’s time to end the lockdown. All of it. We don’t even need to make progressive steps into reopening. All we have to be in order to defeat the virus is brave.
