Pandemic Will Get Worse

I posted this on October 22, more than three months ago. I wish I had not been right but here we are, with dangerous new versions of COVID-19 spreading from Brazil, South Africa, and the UK to that guy next to you in line.

STAY HOME IF YOU CAN

or

WEAR A MASK!

COVID-19 is an RNA virus, like the common cold. RNA viruses mutate frequently. That's why there are a zillion types of colds (Rhinovirus infections).

Most of these changes make no difference, some make it less harmful. A few make it worse. Any mutation that makes it more contagious will spread faster and to more people; that's just what "more contagious" means: it starts rare but becomes common.

Evolution favors not the fittest but the most adaptable, wrote Darwin. What adaptations are most likely to spread around the world? The mutations that cause the virus to spread most easily.

This isn't the end of the pandemic. I'm not sure we have yet reached the end of the beginning.

The more people infected, the more the virus reproduces, the more mutant versions arise, the more likely a more contagious version will become common. Right now, the US is running a vast disease incubator, exploiting millions of people to breed a more contagious, potentially more harmful version of the virus.

You may be young and healthy, unlikely to be harmed by a dose of COVID. Still, you are an incubator, possibly the human Petri dish that breeds a virus that will devastate humanity the way smallpox and measles killed over 90% of Native Americans or plague killed one-third of Europeans. Having few or no symptoms actually makes you _more_ likely to spread this new plague because you are not isolated in bed or an ICU.

Wear a mask.

Not for yourself.

For your species.