2 January

Basic science lacking in the Covid news. Like ‘living with the virus’, Covid becoming ‘endemic’. Covid is an epidemic disease, it will never become endemic. Like smallpox. For centuries smallpox followed the same pattern, of repeated epidemic outbreaks, as we’re experiencing now for Covid. Politicians want us to think that by all getting infected, we’ll end the pandemic. That it will create ‘herd immunity’, we’ll stop catching it and it will be less severe, because our sickness will make us more immune. It won’t, not one disease in the history of the world was ever stopped by everybody becoming infected. Smallpox killed 500 million people in its last century alone. Only vaccines provide herd immunity, and the Covid vaccines aren’t good enough yet to do it. Our only way out remains what it’s been for 2 years - stopping the spread of Covid. Right now, what we’re living, these massive outbreaks, IS ‘living with Covid’. That’s what it will be like, for centuries, unless we stop it. It won’t settle into some nice common cold pattern.