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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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I agree. It killed most of those who were most susceptible already. We'll adapt, as a species, to it over time.
I'm not sure we will adapt. Killing off the elderly and infirm isn't exactly applying a lot of evolutionary pressure.
When you get resistant for it as young and healthy, it won't be as dangerous when you get it again as older. It is good for the virus to spread as much as possible and not be leathal.
Immunity doesn't last though. If it was like chicken pox I think this argument would have merit, but it's more like the flu.
To drive home your point even more, unfortunately chicken pox immunity doesn't really last forever. It's a herpes virus, a DNA virus, that integrates into cell genomes. It especially likes neurons, cells which you keep your whole life. Since it's there for the rest of your life, it reactivates at inconvenient times. Shingles is probably the most benign form of reactivation, but it can cause meningitis, encephalitis, vasculitis too, among other things, all of which is very bad news for your brain. So for all the people out there with children, get that chicken pox vaccine. You don't want that potential ticking time bomb living in your kid when there's a way to prevent it.
And for all the older people out there, get that shingles vaccine when you can. It's not perfect but it'll help "remind" the immune system to keep varicella virus in you surpressed.
Resistance is different than immunity, you will get sick, but it won't be as leathal. It is exactly like flu. Flu has been here for centuries, and when Europeans brought it to America, it was huge issue for native American without resistance.
We have boosters because the resistance doesn't stay or can't keep up with the mutations.
Flu is a dangerous virus, I wouldn't say we've "adapted to it." Viruses evolve much quicker than humans. They go through countless generations in the time we have one. Flu in addition has an interesting genetic mechanism for change most other viruses don't have, where it can exchange entire large sections of its genome at once with other distinct flu viruses, very quickly creating an entirely new strain. This is one of the reasons we're constantly updating the vaccine.
I'm the US, it hospitalizes half a million or so a year and kills between 10,000-50,000 a year, comparable to all people who die from gun violence in a year in the US including suicide. We're always only one unlucky recombination event away from another 1918 flu pandemic, and the more infected people and the more it spreads the more chances for that to happen.
Sorry, I don't know if this was your intention, I just have a pet peeve for flu getting written off as no big deal. It's a huge deal and we should be continuing to work on vaccine and treatment improvements. Oddly our anti viral treatments for covid are probably more effective than anti viral flu treatments at this pont, if people actually take them.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
I also cannot believe that after this recent experience governments around the world aren't pouring even more investment into pandemic monitoring and response. I mean I can, we're notoriously short sighted, but seems governments and people in general are all pretending the pandemic never happened and can never happen again.