RE: Living With Covid
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My own view on SARS-CoV-2, as a physician, is that it is no more deadly than a seasonal flu, with a better-than-99% survival rate for most.
You may be a physician (out of curiosity, what is your specialty?), but you're a bad statistician. Every doctor I have spoken with that is dealing with covid has emphatically disagreed with you. And realistic statistics still show it is ten times more deadly than the flu. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and speculate that you also voted for Trump and the current political crisis has negatively impacted your rational thinking ability. It's not much of a limb with your "mark of the beast" comment.
You may have noticed that I refer to the virus as SARS-CoV-2 rather than COVID. Here's where it gets weird...I believe COVID stands for "Certificate Of Vaccination ID, and that that ID leads to the endgame.
Wow, that may be dumbest thing I have heard yet (not sure as there are so many dumb conspiracy theories going around now about covid). Let's see what that "globalist plan" would look like: 1) spend huge amounts of money to create a virus and vaccine, working in utter secrecy to avoid exposure, 2) put enormous coordinated effort into creating false narratives to get people to take this vaccine to track them, and finally and incredibly stupidly, 4) name it something that could potentially tip off suspicious outsiders as to what it really is. The missing step 3 was the step they forgot where they all got lobotomies that left them thinking step 4 was somehow a good idea.
Just adding to what @altleft has already mentioned
Well most of my close friends in healthcare including both practicing doctors and residents who have been on their toes since the start of pandemic think otherwise. This statement is also quite opposite of what most epidemiologists have been presenting in their talks.
The cycle number 40 is what I have used in a qPCR, every time I have done it since last 10 years. Also, ct value for a positive result was set to <35, with initial RT-PCR assays that we did in testing facility. The cycle number is hardly ever the reason for false positive. If the gene my primers binds to is not there, it wont amplify even at 100 cycles magically. Also, the RT PCR tests were conducted first for E gene, followed by RdRp and ORF1a. Now a days they even use other viral genes in the multiplex assays. This drastically reduces chances of a false positive. If you do see contradiction between amplification of two genes its always best to resample and retest.
Masks can cutoff a lot of droplets that virus rides on. It doesn't eradicate it but it reduces the probability of infection. It reduces it even more, if both infected and target are wearing them. Think of it this way. Viruses don't have wings. And most of them are in droplets and aerosols. They are more like microscopic balls being thrown at you.
Now imagine that you have an old fashioned lift door made of metal grills in front of you. And you have a bucket of balls of random sizes (we will assume all are smaller than the holes between the grills). Would the number of balls you get into this lift will be equal to the number if the grill was left wide open? What if you were also throwing the balls from another closed lift? Well some balls may pass through, but it will take longer time and many more balls to begin with to reach the same target compared to a wide open door. This target in case of virus would be the minimum infectious dose. And this is how even if it doesn't provide ultimate protection it does have power to lower the probability.
Well your concern around this is legit. But, if a complete vaccine means a vaccine that provides "sterilizing immunity"! Well, that has been a theoretical dream, but it rarely happens in practice. A sterlizing immunity would look something like development of LLPCs in all vaccinated individuals which produce constant titers of neutralizing Antibodies (nAbs). Even better if they are mucosal IgA nAbs. The intrinsic variability in the population to begin with makes it hard to achieve. But, let's say it did. Even then once a while a the stoichiometric ratio between virus to guarding nAbs may get skewed towards the virus. And one or two particles will escape to infect one cell somewhere.
But, will this breakthrough infection now develop into a clinically significant infection? Well that is all that matters, now. I mean you also have second layer of immune responses trained by the vaccine in form of memory B and T cells sitting there. Will they let the infection get as bad? That is what has mattered the most, for most vaccines out there. Be it smallpox or measles vaccine. None was perfect to provide absolute sterilizing immunity. But they have been good enough to -