Should we all wear masks outside home?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

42. Well, I did spend part of my childhood, from age 7 to 14 out in the country.

It was dairy country in upstate New York.

I am also one of 6 kids, and came of age when we didn't yet have vaccines for measles, mumps, chicken pox, or rubella (known back then as German Measles). I was born in 1948.

For what it's worth, I was only a few months old when my older sister got chicken pox. My mom brought me to a doctor who gave me a shot of gamma globulin, something relatively common back then. According to my mom, while my older sister got a very bad case of chicken pox (and had scars on her forehead the rest of her life) I had other symptoms, but never got the actual poxes. However, being exposed to it over the years makes it clear that I am immune.

Some years later, before the vaccine was available, I was anxious that my sons get chicken pox. My older son had already been through three rounds of it in elementary schools in two different states. I was planning a spring break trip to my sister in another state, who called me up and said, "You may want to postpone this trip because one, there's a winter storm between us you'll have to drive through, and two, my oldest has just broken out in chicken pox."

I said, "I'm on my way." The winter storm was a mild hitch in the travel. Two weeks after we got home both of my sons broke out in chicken pox. Yes!

Please do not interpret that as anti-vaxx. This was before the chicken pox vaccine.

But back to your basic question. What a lot of people don't understand is how the human immune system works. We are designed to be confronted with lots of diseases in our early years. If we survive to age ten or so, we are highly likely to live through the next forty or fifty years (barring tragic accident), reproduce, perhaps become an elder of our tribe, and then die.

I do know that research has been done that indicates kids who grow up with dogs, and secondarily cats, have more robust immune systems than those who don't have those animals in their childhoods.

Polio was essentially a disease of affluence. Kids who were sheltered from disease were more likely to get certain diseases, such as polio.

One of the problems with this whole Corona Virus thing is that there are a fuck of a lot of people around who would not have been around 50 or 70 years ago. They are highly susceptible to this. A number of them will get this virus, and some of them will die. That is genuinely sad, but not really unexpected. I recall reading decades ago concerns about the fact that even then (and this is probably at least 50 years ago) that people were living and reproducing who would not have lived, let alone reproduced in earlier eras.

Another thought. I think almost all of us would agree that the planet is already overpopulated. Okay, so how do you propose the excess population be culled?

On the up side, there are soon going to be lots of jobs for grave diggers.