COVID "third wave?". WTF are people rambling on about? Why do people believe the patently absurd?
On the radio this morning they were talking about the COVID 19 third wave. This would be unique event in the history of respiratory disease epidemiology. The same disease doesn’t infect the population twice.
A second wave is common because the disease only has a few months to do its thing. As temperature rises respiratory illness subsides. Then, as colder weather returns their may be some people left to infect and so you get a smaller second wave.
The reason it is smaller is because the available pool of uninfected people is smaller. The virus doesn’t “decide” to infect less people, it just runs out of viable hosts. If there were just as many viable hosts in the second wave as there are in the first, then there is no epidemiological reason why the second wave shouldn’t be as big as the first.
The fact that they never, ever are is kind of proof that viral respiratory diseases need viable hosts who, once infected, develop immunity (in general). A so called “third wave” is a disease impossibility. If there were any remaining viable hosts the second wave would be bigger.
If there ever were a third wave, following a smaller second wave, that would be cause for considerable concern. It would indicate that the virus has mutated into something new.
This third wave would actually indicate a new virus and therefore there would be no reason why it couldn’t be as bad as the first wave of its previous iteration. However, that is not what this clueless morons on the radio (BBC of course) were talking about.
They were suggest a third wave of SARS-CoV-2 related COVID 19. What’s worse is that some of those promoting this foolishness were epidemiologists who have apparently been given some access to government as advisors. With advice like that no wonder the government COVID 19 policy response has been so shit.
Worse than shit actually. Rather than listen to all the epidemiologists who said you should quarantine the vulnerable and allow the healthy to be exposed to the virus as quickly as possible, which would have been the rational approach, the UK government were among the many political idiots who decided to ignore the rational and follow the advice of presumably clueless fools.
By locking up the healthy they reduced their capacity to build immunity to the virus. They then exposed the most vulnerable to the virus by sending known COVID 19 patients into uninfected care homes, thereby introducing the disease to the worst of all possible environments, a secluded high density indoor setting.
If they were trying to kill as many vulnerable people as possible they could not have done a better job. Had they listened to real scientists instead of cherry picking the paid shills who would say anything if it supported the governments policy, then they would have behaved differently.
By allowing the healthy to be exposed while secluding the vulnerable, those most able to withstand the virus could have exhausted it within a few weeks. They then could have removed the vulnerable from quarantine, allowing them to see their families again.
This would have had a far less deleterious impact on the economy. Small to medium size businesses would not have been destroyed. The central banks would not have needed to take enormous amounts of highly dodgy assets onto their balance sheets.
There would have been no need to furlough anyone or make them work from home. In fact you would have wanted as many healthy people as possible to work in crowded settings.
The only people who would have needed to work from home would have been those with underlying health conditions who were at risk. Meanwhile all the healthy people could merrily carry on running the economy, absorbing the virus and depleting it in as short a time as possible allowing the world to return to normal as quickly as possible. Not a ”new normal” but rather the traditional normal normal we once enjoyed.
So when I hear qualified ”experts” on the BBC talking about risible unscientific crap like third waves it makes me wonder if, in fact, it isn’t the purpose of the response to create the “new normal?”
Speak Soon