You probably won't die of COVID
"Peter, I had COVID. So did my wife. We both felt bad for a couple of days, but we got over it. I didn't want the vaccine and now we don't need it. We have natural immunity now."
Conversation yesterday with my farm neighbor
Three months ago that neighbor pulled away from me when I mentioned I was vaccinated. "Vaccinated people have changed DNA. They shed a different biome. I keep my distance." He was laughing about it, but he wasn't really joking. He backed away and stayed at a distance.
He didn't get vaccinated, he took no precautions, he caught COVID, every member of his family got it from him, and now, three weeks after he first brought COVID home, he was telling me that everyone was OK. This isn't a unique story. It is a typical one.
My neighbor is perhaps 40-years old and his children are young and being home-schooled. The reality of COVID is that it is hit-and-miss, and that the chances of a very serious disease are low. Not zero, but low. My neighbor is in a position to tell other neighbors and friends that he had COVID and it was not that big a deal. That is what he told me: "I wasn't that sick."
The COVID-concerned population, which includes me, needs to integrate the reality of the typical outcome into our thinking. I am 71 and for people my age and older, COVID is dangerous. If unvaccinated, when we catch the disease some 1% to 5% of us will get seriously sick. That means the vast majority of us won't get terribly sick.
The local hospital publishes reports like the one below, making the point we all know, that most of the sick and dying are among the half of adults in this community who remain unvaccinated. https://news.asante.org
The COVID-concerned feel frustration and dismay. Can't they see not getting vaccinated is dangerous? Aren't they even a tiny bit concerned that they spread the disease to the rest of their community?
The fact that most people survive COVID is a headwind for widespread vaccination. Very few people read hospital web pages compared to the number of people who share experiences with friends. A neighbor who got COVID is a direct source. He is alive. The dead don't talk.
There are communities of confirmation by neighbors, friends, and local political leadership, saying COVID is no big deal, and that vaccinations are government overreach. Douglas County--a Trump-supporting timber area--has less than one seventh the population of Multnomah County, but has 59% of its COVID cases--five times the Multnomah rate. The same ratio is in effect in rural Baker and Harney Counties.
I suspect that the die has been cast for America. COVID is endemic. The vaccinated will be mostly--but not entirely--protected against the worst of it. The unvaccinated are getting COVID and taking their chances. Some will die; many will clog up the hospitals. Most people will survive, and they will have some level of natural immunity. The number of vulnerable are shrinking. Hospitalizations already going down. COVID is running out of targets.
There it is. That is how it is working out in the USA. Unless there is a new variant, which could happen, COVID will fade away. A few extra tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of us will have died earlier than we would have, but eventually all of us die. America will survive.
Leadership matters. It shaped that original word-of-mouth. Leadership defined COVID as something to power through, masks as tyranny, and the vaccine when administered by Democrats, as suspicious and best avoided. It did not have to be this way.