A time capsule, hopefully of the past.

I don’t watch much TV, but occasionally I’ll glance over at a show and see actors or sets in masks. Hopefully those eventually become a time capsule of our age, forgotten about as vaccination rates climb and COVID-19 hospitalizations drop. Shows shot during or set during the 2020s might include masks for COVID, but better vaccinations and drugs should make this unnecessary. COVID-19 is not the first nor will it be the last novel respiratory virus to infect humans, and after every new virus we have and should continue to adapt and overcome to the point that we can live with it “normally.” I don’t foresee a scenario in which any virus could force a permanent change to how humans inhabit our planet. 100 thousand
years ago, novel viruses were springing up in our ancestor’s societies, and yet even without vaccines each new one was overcome. Survivors (of whom most vaccinated people are expected to be) gain immunity to the virus, it’s a sort of truism of immunology that you cannot clear a virus without gaining some form of immunity. Some viruses never clear of course, and hang around in the body waiting for immunity to die off so they can re-emerge. But if a virus is TRULY cleared, and by all accounts COVID is a virus that can be cleared from the body, then it has to be done by the actions of immune system systematically gaining an adaptive advantage over the virus through antibody production, cell-mediated immunity or otherwise. If the immune
system doesn’t gain this advantage, then the virus just continues to multiply and kills the host. And once the immune system gains this advantage, then it should be better equipped to deal with any future infection from the new virus, even mutant forms of it. Viruses mutate all the time, but antibodies and T-cell receptors can also be adapted by the body to these new, mutated forms.

During the pandemic I saw a lot of fears that this virus was going to be so terrible, that some of the following would happen:
People would never become immune even after clearing the virus
Prior infections would not give defense against future infections
Vaccines could never be developed which would give immunity
COVID was going to kill off everyone

The people saying these things didn’t really know it, but for these fears to be true basically all of recorded immunology would have to be false. If you don’t develop immunity than you cannot clear the virus, clearing it is an EFFECT of the gain in immunity. This gain in immunity must by necessity protect against future infections which come from the same viral sero-types. And since COVID shows no evidence of being a latent virus, then vaccines against it must be possible. Finally it would be basically impossible for COVID to kill everyone, in any scenario there would be some people among the 7 billion on earth who by some mutation would be immune to the virus, and even if all the rest of us died off they would continue on.

I think some of this could have been brought on by a sort of doomerism that is probably common among all societies. “Giant Meteor of Death 2016” was something of a meme I recall pushed by people claiming the world was so shit it was better to just end it all. Pretty much every society goes through those feelings, and a global pandemic may have seemed like the realization of exactly those fears that society would or should be destroyed. But that just didn’t happen, and the people claiming that vaccinated folks shouldn’t go out and socialize like it’s 2019, well I kind of view them as essentially anti-vaxxers. For they deny what we all know, that vaccines are safe and effective at protecting from the disease.

Some people don’t realize that immunity isn’t a light switch, it isn’t on and off. It’s a sliding scale and can be modified by many things. Humans have a natural immunity shielding us from many many viruses already, whether through altered proteins that the viruses cannot well attach to or through innate pathways that defend against pathogens. Meanwhile immunity can be weakened by things such as obesity, pregnancy, emotional state, etc. So it isn’t a switch that once you are immune you never get COVID, rather gaining
immunity gives you a much lower chance of catching COVID later, but less chance is never no chance.