Thread by @1goodtern

If you know that vaccine acquired immunity wanes over time, you should find this graph concerning.

A thread about waning, evasion, time between infections, and danger.

It just makes me wonder.
What's worse for you, to catch Covid once every six months, every year, or every two years?

Is it more dangerous to suffer:
more frequent but hopefully attenuated acute infections with the associated risk of long term consequences from each infection
or
less frequent but more severe acute infections with increased risk of more severe long term consequences?

I'm not sure if I asked that in an intelligible way 😅 but I have my suspicions about the answer.
I'll try to rephrase it and explain it in a moment.

The problem is that we don't really know where the greatest risk lies.

Governments ran with the assumption that vaccinations followed by regular repeated infections would be enough to stop the worst of the serious illness and death and disability that covid can cause.

But since they've shut down testing and data tracking they can't see that that approach is failing.
Acute Covid infections are still killing hundreds every week in the UK and disabling thousands, and the delayed effects are doing the same on a delay.

Which brings me back to the question.
Is time between infections our friend or our enemy or both or neither?

The theory is that most people should have milder illness during the acute stage (first couple of weeks) of their infection if they have been vaccinated or infected in the last six months or so.
But...
And it's a big but...

But... everyone should know by now (but they don't) that you're not just at risk during the acute infection, you're also at significantly raised risk of death and illness and disability from a vast number of causes for a prolonged period *after* your covid infection.

Again, in theory, that delayed and extended raised risk may be lower if you have been vaccinated or had another infection recently.
But...

But... each infection teaches some parts of your body how to fight the next infection, but also damages your body's ability to fight *any* infection.

And so your body may appear to suffer less during the acute stage (which is mostly your body's own defences, rather than the damage of the virus) if you're infected more frequently, but may be suffering more hidden damage.

But then if you're not being vaccinated with boosters, and you're not getting an infection for an extended period, say a year and a half, what's going to be the effect of having an infection with a variant that evades some of your existing immunity?

What are going to be the short and long term implications?

So...
The infection based immunity programme is a dangerous mess.
No science, no plan, no understanding of how it's going to work, just hope.

And hope is still not a valid mitigation in a pandemic.

Oh, and maybe you want to know what I think the answer might be to the question of which is better, to be infected every six months, every year, or every two years...

I think the answer may be that over ten years the result may well be about the same.

So we probably need to work out a way of 🚨not getting infected repeatedly🚨