I'm going to make the Covid / Flu comparison...

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

20. Several things to keep in mind.

Covid is no doubt here to stay. And while I don't want to seem to be dismissive of it, in reality, it's simply not all that fatal. And as bad as it can be, people are just not dying in numbers that are greater than births.

Yes, each and every death is a tragedy and might have been prevented, but the population overall is totally unaffected by this.

Heck, even the 1918 flu epidemic did not noticeably decrease overall population.

What really matters is not so much herd as individual immunity. We all have our own unique individual immune system. Some of us get sick with every little thing, others (like me) simply never get sick at all. Along with those individual differences, there are people with some sort of compromised immune system. To be frank, a lot of people are alive these days, especially in first world countries, who would not have been around a hundred years ago. The very hard question we need to ask is: do we continue to protect and keep alive everyone possible?

Another thing that's connected to this. A lot of people think it's fantastic that there were very few cases of cold or influenza this past year mainly because of wearing masks. And so they think continued mask wearing is the way to go. However, our immune system really is designed to be challenged with all sorts of things, fight them off, and get stronger. If we keep young children from being exposed to stuff, they are going to be in serious trouble as young adults. They'll have almost no working immune system and that's not good.

Read John M. Barry's The Great Influenza . Among the things he talks about is how these young men from the farms of Kansas, who'd never been more than ten miles from home, who'd never interacted with more than 50 people in their entire lives, who'd simply never gotten the then normal childhood diseases, were now put into army training camps, housed in cramped quarters with hundreds, sometimes thousands of other young men from similar situations. Surprise, surprise. They got sick in vast numbers and lots of them died. And then the Great Influenza struck.

Being exposed to stuff is, in the long run, highly beneficial.