Noun-centric thinking is making it difficult to explain and understand the dynamics of covid19. People seem to not understand that everything is a process.
Knowledge discovery is a process. Covid19 is novel because it is a new virus and its characteristics are unknown without further investigations. Of course, one has to balance the time required for information and the need to act swiftly.
Science is a knowledge discovery process. It is not a label you slap on to something that remains unchanging for all time. Yes, we do these for food items up to an expiration date. But after the expiration date, all labels attached to the food item aren't expected to hold.
The covid is a virus that changes its characteristics every time it infects a host that further infects another host. Humans are the petri-dishes for experimentation of the virus. Thus what science understands about the virus must change the more frequently it spreads.
It's what people will call a moving target. If the CDC appears to be moving the goal posts all the time, then it is because the goal posts are actually moving all the time! The reason the virus is called the Delta-variant is that it is different from the original one.
Infection is also not like slapping a label on a person. It's a process and differs from person to person in the amount of infection (i.e. viral load). One can get a positive test but not have any symptoms because your viral load is small.
People who get vaccinated do not have an impenetrable wall against getting infected. Again it is a process. The virus comes into you as you breathe and it takes time for the immunity process to get rid of the virus.
This immunity process is different when you are vaccinated as compared to the unvaccinated. For the former, the immune process has been previously been trained to detect the virus, and thus it can react very quicky to get rid of the virus.
In the case of the unvaccinated, a person's immune system still has to try to discover that it indeed is infected. That discovery process can take time. Sometimes it can take a very long time (see: long covid). Because it takes time, unvaccinated carries the virus longer.
The longer a human carries the virus, the longer the human can be used as a petri-dish. The longer the human carries the virus, the more chances it can infect other people.
Covid19 is a process, yet many people seem to not understand that people are part of the process. Viruses are able to propagate because it uses people in its process.
To stop the process, you can have people die (and not serve as a petri-dish) or you can have people observe CDC guidelines for behavior.
The oddest thing is that so many people think only of labels. That wearing a mask is a label of compliance. That getting vaccination is a label of compliance. That infection is a binary label. It is patently stupid because many people understand the world only as nouns.
A world where process is absent. A world of absolutes. A world that is unchanging. A world that prioritizes the status quo over change. In summary, people are cognitively conditioned to be unable to see processes.
In the world of the evangelical believer (also typically an anti-vaxxer), there is no process, only labels. Their religious doctrine is that one is 'saved' permanently only when one makes the act of acknowledgment of being saved. There is no process after that gets you unsaved.
So if you wonder why America has an astoundingly different response to vaccination than Europe (its Western cousin), then it is due to a very odd philosophy that is inculcated in the religions that America has invented. That of literalism and an irrational reverence of symbols.
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