Thread by @1goodtern

I had a reply yesterday that said that if everyone masked and socially distanced for 2 weeks, we would stop the spread of Covid.

I love this sentiment, and it's true.
It would stop covid for a while.

But only for a while.
Important thread that may help you understand things...

Although it might not help you understand things, because this is pretty complicated, and I find it hard to get my head round how to explain it sequentially.

Figuring out where to start is a nightmare.

Another thing this thread may do is help you understand what most public health organisations are trying to do by *allowing or encouraging* the spread of Covid.

Let's start there.

Let's start with the question of why people catch it when.

A relative said to me yesterday:
"I don't understand it. When I flew to Mexico with dozens of coughing people, I didn't catch a thing. Then weeks later I caught it from one hour in hospital...

... And then I was ill when I was staying with my family, and none of them got it."

So why did he not catch Covid a couple of months ago when he was on a flight or in hospital or in a shop two months ago, but then did catch it a month ago.

It's not about exposure.

Covid is around everywhere here.

It's always in the air in hospitals even in quieter periods.
It's always around in nurseries.
Possibly not so constant in schools any more, interestingly.

Cafés, shops, museums, cinemas, garages, offices, people go everywhere with it, so your everyday person will be encountering it regularly.

So, the question is, why do they catch it this week, and not last week?

The answer has two main parts:
The person
The variant

The person caught Covid maybe six or nine months ago.
When that happened, their body reacted to clear the infection.

But gradually the defences, things like antibodies, gradually start to crumble.
That's "immunity waning".

Waning means getting smaller or weaker.

And then the variants are changing too, and the ones that are more effective at infecting people infect more people, and they change to evade the existing immunity.

So that's immunity evasion.

So
Person: immunity waning
Variant: immunity evasion

You might ask why the immunity wanes if the person is encountering covid wherever they go.

Well, an encounter that doesn't cause a full blown infection doesn't generate full blown immunity.

And it only causes a full blown infection when the combination of immunity waning and immunity evasion is sufficient.

So the thing that is preventing a new infection for most people most of the time is existing immunity against existing variants.

So they might not catch it on the plane that month, but then they catch it in the hospital this month.

And because immunity is all that's protecting them, they're more likely to catch it during a wave for two reasons:
Most people's immunity will wane at a similar rate
and
The variant that is able to cause a new wave will be able to evade existing immunity at a similar rate.

So they're not just catching it because there's more of it around.

It's a combination of immunity waning and immunity evasion - and the wave is the product *and* the cause.

Waves now are not just caused by the variant.

The ground has to be fertile for the seeds to flourish.

There are some people who are very fertile ground catching it much more frequently.

(Plus, I think, and this is an aside, I think that covid finds it hard to spread fast in the UK flu and cold season, because those harmful viruses actually set up your immune system to be primed to fight covid...

... I think Covid weakens your response to the other infections, but the other infections strengthen your response to covid. Don't rely on this as a tactic, because it has its own hazards)

And don't forget the effects of boosters.

Some sectors of society have had the benefits of actual real vaccine boosters, not infection boosters.

They're going to play their part in helping train the body.

Now here's where public health comes in.

They don't want any massive waves of Covid that might break healthcare systems or food or manufacturing supply chains or cause societal shutdown.

And public health is currently *relying on* these smaller rolling waves of infection to keep people exposed to the virus enough so that their immunity doesn't wane *all the way to the point where it's like they've never encountered covid before*.

Because if that happens, however long it takes, two years, four years, eight years, it might be the case that you'd have another scenario like 2020.

People's first encounters with the virus in 2020 were terrible.

I'll come back to the terrible encounters in a moment.

So, in the meantime, why don't we all wear masks for two weeks and socially distance to stop the wave?

Well, yes, it does stop the wave in the short term, and you could do it whenever a wave built big enough to trigger this action.
You'd have to do it repeatedly, throughout the seasons of the year, every year.

Which is entirely doable.

You would have to combine this action with *regular vaccination for everyone*.

Why?

Because if you stop the regular waves of infection then you risk resetting everyone's immunity back to 2020.

But regular vaccination for everyone is a horse that's bolted.

Public health thought it was cheaper to use infections, and they let antivax sentiment flourish, and regular boosters are now history.

And besides existing vaccines don't *prevent* infection and the *effects of the virus* so that's where I'd like to come back to those terrible infections of 2020 and their terrible consequences.

Why are infections now *generally* less awful for most of the population than in 2020?

Not because of the virus.
Not because of the infection.

It's because of *your reaction to the virus*.

In 2020, if you caught Covid, your body thought it had been invaded by the ultimate enemy army and burnt every square inch of land to kill it.

*Your reaction* to covid was extreme. Your body panicked.

That scorched earth policy, the body's violent reaction to covid, is often what caused the *very worst* effects in the first wave or the first encounter.

Very often, people were killed by their body's own defences.
I know that seems weird, but Google it.

And then, for most people, following vaccination or infection, your body's reaction would be less panicked when it encountered the virus.

So for most infections now, your body doesn't overreact.

But, again, that's why public health are thinking it's good to keep infecting you.

They don't want to reset people's body's reactions to 2020.

But there's an even bigger but.

And that's not your body's reaction, it's what Covid infection does to you.

Not just what it does to you in the first two weeks of infection.

But the damage it leaves that shows six weeks later.

And the dysfunction it causes that escalates over the next two years.

Covid infection increases the risk of pretty much every health problem, because it causes damage to every part of the body.

It infects and damages the lining of capillaries ffs.
That on its own is enough to make every other problem worse.

How much worse?

For everyone, at least a little bit worse with every infection.

But for some, a lot worse with each infection.

And, yes, novelty is a problem.
But, yes, constant repeat infection is a problem.

Public health think that there's no way to maintain the eradication of Covid infection, so they balance the damage caused by repeat infections against the damage of a huge new wave, and they weigh the economic damage of each too.

But they also *deny the damage of repeat covid infections*, so they're not really doing a fair measure of one against the other.

Here in the UK, the vaccination decisions board *refuse to acknowledge* any long term effects of covid infection in vaccination decisions.

So, yes, to get back to the original point, two weeks of masking and distancing would knock the wave on the head.

But that the only people who would consider that useful would be the people who think that the long term effects of infection are real and serious.

Meanwhile those public health organisations either just hope it will go away, or hope that there will be sterilising vaccines at some point, or actually think that killing a few old people (and young, and disabling some) is cool, or are just living in ignorance or denial.

So...
What does little old tern think is the solution...

And today I do feel little and old.

I think the same thing that I've always done.

That we need to breathe clean indoor air.

We drink clean water.

We eat clean food.

We use toilets and not the street.

We wash our hands and our hair.

But we share infected air.

The size and scale of modern buildings combined with the speed and scale of international travel combined with our now increased vulnerability to respiratory infections (that itself was caused by covid infections) means that they spread like wildfire.

I may even be more concerned about what *covid has made us vulnerable to* rather than covid itself, if that makes sense.

Although the more times you catch Covid, the more problems it's going to cause.

A covid infection may make you briefly less likely to catch Covid, but it makes you more vulnerable to worsened damage this time *and even more next time*.

We need to change western society at its heart - or at least in its lungs.

We don't need two week firebreaks repeating forever.

We need clean indoor air.

Governments know it, because they have given themselves it.

US Congress, UK parliament, Spanish parliament, UN hq, WHO hq, the pentagon, the MOD, government departments across the world have given themselves hepa filtered air.

We need that everywhere.

The cost would be:
Peanuts
An economic boost
Massively smaller than the cost of repeat infection
Also good for the environment in the long term
Affordable

But does it solve that original public health dilemma:
To infect
Or
To not infect

Yes.
Because if you improve indoor air, there will literally be no airborne pandemic.

And, yes, Covid is almost entirely spread by airborne particles.

If you improve indoor air, you never have to worry about a future airborne pandemic.

Not just covid.
Anything.
Bird flu, virus x, weaponised aerosol Ebola (see Tom Clancy).

Yes, it will take some time, but not long.

This is the warp speed project we need.

In the meantime, masks in healthcare.

Good public information about which masks work, how they work, and why they work.

Information about why it's good to avoid infection with Covid.

Better availability of testing.

Proper sick pay.

Vaccines.

Until we're breathing clean air.

In the meantime:

Wear a [high quality, n95+/ffp2+] mask [properly].

PS
so it might be tempting to think that a couple of months of exhaustive masking and distancing worldwide might knock it out of circulation.
Sadly, even if that were practically possible, it wouldn't help, because...

https://x.com/silentanb/status/1962801391787012202

... because there are circulating variants popping up every week from internally persistent infections.
From people who caught Covid three years ago, or two years ago, or one year ago, and the infection has carried on replicating inside them...

... and pops out again now.

Covid really may be forever now, just based on the existing persistent infections.

Which is even more reason to put clean air in place everywhere, because sooner or later one of those persistent infections is going to brew a variant that resets us to 2020.