this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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The most dangerous thing when COVID emerged was it's novelty. Since no one's immune system had seen anything like it before, it had free reign to do widespread damage to it's victims often without any immune response and spread like wildfire.
Most of the planet is has either caught COVID, been immunized, or both at this point. Even though the variant changes it's not a completely novel disease. As such the damage it can do is limited.
At this point enacting controls other than immunization will be counterproductive. Remember that any control you place on a pathogen is a selection pressure for it to evolve to overcome it. So masks, distancing etc. that we half-assed at the heat of the pandemic will make the pathogen evolve to overcome them.
The best and most effective control is immunization. We need to hold the other controls in reserve for if/when that fails.