Newly Discovered Covid Risks and their Mask and Vaccine Logic

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Among the newly discovered risks of Covid-19 is the risk of cognitive decline, especially among seniors. That seems plausible to me, for we appear to have a national epidemic of fuzzy thinking.

In the last two weeks or so, we’ve discovered three things about the delta variant (besides cognitive decline) that we didn’t know before:

A. People who are vaccinated can carry the disease, either asymptomatically or with relative mild symptoms, and pass it on to others;

B. The delta variant causes infected people to replicate about a thousand times more virus than earlier variants; and

C. Despite A and B, the risks of vaccinated people being hospitalized or dying, even from the delta variant, is still minuscule compared to the similar risks of unvaccinated people.

Now let’s suppose—contrary to every indication over the last 18 months—that our species is rational, as befits our self-awarded title Home sapiens. At a minimum, that would seem to imply that: (1) people don’t want to get sick or die; (2) they don’t want to increase the risk of others getting sick or dying (at least people they care about); and (3) all want their lives and the general economy to get back to normal ASAP.

If we newly take discovered risks (A), (B), and (C) together with idealized popular goals (1), (2) and (3), what conclusions can we draw?

First, everyone, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, should wear masks when indoors with strangers. If you’re vaccinated and unmasked, you could still get infected. Even if you aren’t hospitalized and most likely won’t die, who wants to get sick? More important, if you catch Covid, you could become a “Covid Mary” and pass the disease on to others, who might get seriously sick and die (if unvaccinated), or might pass the disease on to yet more people (even if vaccinated). And if you’re prudent enough to get vaccinated, how about saving those scarce hospital and ICU resources for the people who really need them, namely, the unvaccinated? Finally, if any of this happens at scale, as appears likely, the dream of getting back to normal will recede into an idle fantasy.

If you’re unvaccinated, similar considerations apply just as much to you, plus two more. If you get the disease, you could be hospitalized or die. Or you could have all the debilitating effects of “long-haul” Covid, which would pretty much ruin your life.

The second major conclusion is that everyone who’s not vaccinated should get vaccinated ASAP. Now that we know that even vaccinated people can be carriers, the known risk to the unvaccinated just increased by half in red states and tripled in blue states. Why? The proportion of known potential carriers went up to the whole population (100%) from the roughly 66% unvaccinated in the worst red states and from the 33% unvaccinated in most blue states. And that’s without even factoring in the thousand-fold increase in viral load among from people infected with the delta variant. Think that might make the delta even more contagious?

The part of the CDC’s recent guidance that recommends looking at the hazard map has little or nothing to do with science or logic. Instead, it’s a sop to the know-nothings and extreme libertarians, to whom their “freedom” to be reckless and stupid is apparently more important than health and life. It’s diluting science with politics.

Why is this so? First, the hazards and maps change daily: the present nth wave of the pandemic is a fluid situation that is changing rapidly as the delta variant rages. How many people are going to get on the Web and consult the CDC’s website before going out to dinner or going to a store? We’d be lucky if we could just get people to grab a mask on their way out the door, and not wear it under their noses.

These conclusions apply without even considering the next Covid variant(s). New ones might render the existing vaccines less effective, be even more contagious, or be even more deadly. The more we pussyfoot around, and the longer we delay in getting the virus under control worldwide, the greater the chance of having to deal with one or more even more dreadful variants.

Viral evolution is an automatic, continuous and unstoppable process. Its speed is roughly proportional to the number of people infected and the number of viruses replicating in each. With the delta variant, we just saw a thousand-fold jump in the typical infected person’s viral load. And we know that, with most people unvaccinated outside the “developed” world, the number of infected people is going to go steadily up for the foreseeable future. What further horrors might arise in the next variant as the delta rages rampant in all the nearly totally unvaccinated parts of the developing world?

Except temporarily, in isolated places like Taiwan, New Zealand and South Korea, testing, contract tracing and quarantining have failed almost everywhere. The only things we’ve got that we know work now are masking, distancing and vaccines. Isn’t it about time we start getting serious about what we know works, before this virus and its mutants start decimating our nation and our species?

The longer we delay doing what we know works, the farther the dream of normalcy fades into a murky and uncertain future. I think we’ve proved by now that successive waves of infection are not the best way to restart the economy.

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