Please Let’s All Work Together Against The Virus

When a virus goes into a living being, it replicates itself, but it’s not a perfect replica. Since the mission of the virus is to infect and replicate, it uses information from the host’s DNA to improve the infection capability of the next generation. It’s like a criminal teaching his children to be better criminal than he is.

The evolutionary process creates a steady stream of mutations, the so-called variants that we hear about on the news.

One approach that some people suggested early on in the Covid-19 pandemic was to let the virus infect as many people as possible. The most sensitive people would die off, but the rest of the population would reach a state of herd immunity. When the virus no longer had people to infect, it no longer spreads.

This theory fails to take mutation into account. The virus keeps evolving into new variants, some of which will be more transmissible and potentially more dangerous. When more people are infected, more variants emerge. When the variants change significantly from the original strain of the virus, they can infect people who were infected previously. Variants can kill people who survived prior infections.

We are in a race against time. We need to stop the virus before it creates variants that existing vaccines cannot control. Companies can create new vaccines and boosters, but the virus will always be some number of steps ahead.

Please get vaccinated unless your healthcare provider recommends that you don’t. We need to get to a point where the virus can’t spread easily. That’s the only way to slow the evolution of mutations. 

Please also do your part by following the essential public health guidelines that have been recommended from the beginning of the pandemic. Wear masks in public and when you’re with people who don’t live in your home. Avoid crowed indoor gatherings. Wash your hands frequently and avoid touching your face.

If we all work together, we can slow this thing down and finally get back to our normal lives. If we avoid vaccination and relax other precautions, the virus will keep spreading and mutating, and this dreaded scourge will grind on far longer than it has to.