The Road to Hell is Still Paved with Assumptions

We need to stop talking about the post-Covid world. There is no such thing. Covid is not an event. It is not an invading army. Instead, it is a structural change in our world. Covid will be with us for the rest of our lives, and we need to adapt. Unless a miracle occurs.

We obsess over a vaccine. We talk as if a vaccine makes Covid go away for ever, but no vaccine is ever 100% effective for the rest of your life. A vaccine reprograms your immune system in a way that makes it stronger against certain pathogens. The effects may last a lifetime or a few months. The effectiveness may be close to 100% as for measles, which is 95%, or lower, like 40% for the flu. We have never had a successful vaccine for a single strand RNA virus such as Covid.

The medical community now is telling us to expect something like 50%, two doses and maybe a year. That is not what the public means when they say vaccine. I think people think it is going to be 99% effective for a lifetime. Understand that in terms of public health it will be enormously valuable to have such a vaccine — -if people take it. However, I do not think that will be sufficient to greatly reduce the level of perceived fear. Polls suggest that maybe half the people will not take a vaccine even if it had high efficacy and long life.

We have a pandemic of fear. Covid is scary. It can kill you. Your spouse, child or grandchild could appear totally healthy and yet give it to you. The earliest warnings when we thought transmission from surfaces was dominant persist, even though we now think most transmission is droplet or particle in the air.

The media and the politicians have all stoked this fear. Some of it was to gain compliance with countermeasures such as a lockdown. Much was based on flawed models based on poor data. Early treatment was ineffective because the disease was new, so death rates were higher. The media picked a metric of total deaths from Covid, and the numbers seemed horrific. I am not making light of anything, but for context roughly 8,000 people die every day in the United States. We also conflated death from Covid with death with Covid.

The last pandemic we had fifty years ago we did nothing in response. This time we tried. However, there is no legal framework for a national pandemic response. The states are in charge. Not the federal government. Cf. the tenth amendment. The patchwork of orders was just that. A patchwork. From cell phone tower registration data we know…