Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Humans and Viruses Evolved Together Versus "Management" World

One of the tropes of the Coughing 9/11 is that the spread of this virus can be managed. I think there's no real reason to believe that's even a worthy goal. The logic is hospital capacity is limited, so ideally the rate of the spread should be reduced in an attempt to scale it to limited hospital capacity as if that were a fixed system that can't be changed relatively easily.

Countries around the world shut down because there are limited hospital beds and hospital equipment. Another approach would have been to build up that capacity to care for the worst cases, obviously. That would have cost much, much less, however, at least in the USA, medical care is provided by a cartel business.

Humans and viruses evolved together over eons. The immune system of a healthy individual will fight off most infections--the aggregate immune response of entire populations effectively staunches the spread of many diseases. Really deadly diseases generally staunch their own spread by killing off their hosts. The common cold persists because it doesn't.

The idea that the spread of the disease can be managed, especially through technological means, like cell-phone apps and data mining is kind of stupid. Reducing store hours, for example, is possibly counter-productive and shoves people together more than normal. If people had eyes to see pathogens, maybe we could out-evolve them and never be sick again, but we don't, so we won't.

The real problem though, is it might make sense for people to face the danger and let their natural defenses defeat the illness... That might actually produce the best overall outcome. There's really no reason to believe it's better to massively quarantine populations to avoid seasonal illnesses.

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