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Tuesday Update for 2021-02-09: Wolves — 2 Comments

  1. Love that Atlantic article on herd immunity. I keep hearing talk in the media about how herd immunity will get us back to normal, but that’s pretty unlikely. Ms. Zhang’s article covers the reasons very thoroughly.

    I suspect that “back to normal” will actually happen when we’re comfortable that everyone who’s worried about getting Covid-19 has been vaccinated. Like the flu, Covid-19 will still be around. People will still get sick from it, but hopefully not in the huge numbers that strain our medical systems.

    • Last August Vincent Racaniello outlined one possible (probable?) future for humanity’s long-term coexistence with SARS-CoV-2: it may become just another common cold virus. With the help of vaccines that greatly reduce the severity of Covid-19, and with its own evolution favoring disease outcomes that don’t kill the host, we may thus come into a stable equilibrium with this virus. Note that one of the four coronaviruses that cause a fraction of colds today is believed to have spurred a pandemic in the late 1880s.

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