Isn't this a very bad thing? Children will be growing up without developing immunity for this strain, and probably many other(?) virus strains. You mentioned reservoirs in untested populations. What percentage of the global population is regularly tested for this "extinct" strain of flu? I assume it's nit many, leaving huge potential for reservoirs of strains thought extinct, making it most likely that the strain will come back. Or come back from a non-human organism. And when it comes back, people would have less immunity to it and if you compound that with the fact that it would come back as a wave, with everyone getting it at once (as happens with the flu virus) then surely that is a bad thing. Or am I missing something?
This reminds me if a metaphor from Nicholas Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile. If you want to fight forest fires, your instinct might be to ride out and and extinguish every small forest fire, to prevent it becoming a big one. But in doing so, you save more and more tinder from being burned away, leading to a very easily flammable landscape.
In the case of covid protocols, I worry that preventing the small viruses from barraging our immune systems might create an easily infectable population.
I'm way out on a limb here intellectually so I'd appreciate some discourse on this.
JDS150k t1_j2d660z wrote
Reply to comment by shimmeringships in Was there a decrease in other infectious diseases other than Covid due to wearing masks during the past 2 years? by [deleted]
Isn't this a very bad thing? Children will be growing up without developing immunity for this strain, and probably many other(?) virus strains. You mentioned reservoirs in untested populations. What percentage of the global population is regularly tested for this "extinct" strain of flu? I assume it's nit many, leaving huge potential for reservoirs of strains thought extinct, making it most likely that the strain will come back. Or come back from a non-human organism. And when it comes back, people would have less immunity to it and if you compound that with the fact that it would come back as a wave, with everyone getting it at once (as happens with the flu virus) then surely that is a bad thing. Or am I missing something?
This reminds me if a metaphor from Nicholas Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile. If you want to fight forest fires, your instinct might be to ride out and and extinguish every small forest fire, to prevent it becoming a big one. But in doing so, you save more and more tinder from being burned away, leading to a very easily flammable landscape.
In the case of covid protocols, I worry that preventing the small viruses from barraging our immune systems might create an easily infectable population.
I'm way out on a limb here intellectually so I'd appreciate some discourse on this.