It is unlikely that we will reach herd immunity. It's more likely that covid will become endemic like 'flu, with surges and hotspots.
There are a number of factors which affect herd immunity. One of them is whether vaccinated people can still catch covid and spread it, but as above, that's looking promising.
Uneven roll out across countries and/or states will impact upon global herd immunity. Countries like the UK and Israel owe much of their vaccination success to a centralised and consistent programme. We should have had a global version of that, or in the case of the US, a country-wide version instead of each state doing it's own thing.
Emerging variants will affect herd immunity if current vaccines fail to work for new strains, but it looks like so far we've been lucky. How long protection lasts from the disease, or the vaccine will also be a factor. Will we need updated vaccines to cope with new strains and/or regular boosters to maintain protection?
Vaccine hesitancy is a major issue with respect to herd immunity. We need to get a certain proportion of the population vaccinated to reach herd immunity. To my mind, adults should be taking on that responsibilty so we can avoid risk of disease, or risk from vaccination in our children.
The more adults who refuse to be vaccinated, the more likely our children will have to take up the slack. It's likely children won't have the privilege of choosing for themselves as parents will choose for them.
If someone said to me that the vaccine has risks and there's a possibility you could become permanently debilitated, or die...BUT...if you take that risk your grandchildren won't have to, it's a total no-brainer.
As adults we should be aiming to achieve herd immunity, whatever the risks to ourselves, to protect the short, cute ones. Lobbing kids out of life boats and taking their place is simply not cricket.
Severity of symptoms has a lot to do with viral load. That became apparent last summer.
Viral load is how many of the wee virus you have in your body. How many you have will depend upon whether someone coughs millions of them into your face, or you pick up three, or four oorganisms off your bulk bought toilet paper packaging.
Once you have at least one virus in your system, it will replicate increasing your viral load, but you'll also have an immune response which kills them off.
So, somene who picks up three, or four virus and has a healthy immune response will not have a high viral load and will not get too sick.
If someone is already sick and/or old and they pick up millions, the virus will replicate rapidly and leave them very poorly indeed.
The vaccine primes your immune response, so even if you have millions of virus coughed into your face, your immune response will kill them off rapidly. That means, even if you get covid, you won't at any point have a huge viral load - you'll either have mild symptoms, or be asymptomatic.
With the vaccine, even if you pick up the virus, you won't have millions to cough into someone's face. You might pass on a few virus, but not enough to make other people really sick. Fewer virus kicking around means fewer transmissions.
The vaccination programmes starting with the sick and elderly was tactical. If the sick and elderly became ill they were less likely to have a good immune response and more likely to have the virus replicate inside their bodies increasing their viral load. These people had plenty to cough in other people's faces and so spread more disease.
Vaccinating those most likely to spread the virus reduced the spread. It also meant that with fewer people reaching the hospitalisation and dying stage due to huge viral loads, there was less strain on health services and more nurses available for vaccination programmes.
The problem as I see it is that once you've vaccinated the over 80's and sick, your over 70's become the juiciest hosts for the virus. As the vaccination programmes have advanced in descending age order, we are now finding more young people and children are getting sick as they become the only hosts left.
The question for me is whether as vaccinated adults we can reduce the incidence of the virus enough to protect our children and grandchildren, or whether they will start getting sick instead of us.
I have concerns about vaccinating children: a child might be less able to express symptoms of underlying health issues, or if they do, we might assume the have growing pains before we thnk of something like leukemia. We also don't know how chldren and young people will react to vaccinations, as with the risks of blood clots with the AstraZeneca affecting youngsters with low platelet levels.
I've seen funnier and more irreverent arguments about the non-existence of 'god' from Ricky Gervaise.
You're still missing my point, though.
The fact that Steven Colbert qualified that he believed in one 'god' in 'three persons' still relies on the personification of a higher power, rather than a concept which has power, or the potential for power.
When we say 'mother nature', we don't think of an enormous woman in the sky controlling births, deaths an marriages, we know it's a concept to describe the cycle of life in all it's awesome forms.
It seems odd to me that so many people seem to miss the point when it comes to 'god the fella'. What sense would there be in building churches to worship 'mother nature' whilst forgetting to feed the dog? Surely the best way to worship 'mother nature' is to get out there, live it and nuture it.
So it is with 'god': worshipping 'god the fella' in a building whilst ignoring war, famine and generally participating in destruction is bonkers. 'God' should be the acts of living and nuturing, not a person, or three.
If you start to let go of the idea of 'god the fella', belief and non-belief become irrelevant The relevant bit becomes how you live and nuture.
It's your version of Grenfell Tower, where at least 72 people died horribly.
The government sat on reports before it happened saying it shouldn't take a major disaster for action to be taken to avoid a major disaster and yet little action has been taken to avoid another disaster in many, many other buildings around the UK.
'God' is just a noun which is used to describe something.
It could be used to describe Human Spirit (in it's better forms).
The Human Spirit (in it's better forms) might be considered the highest power because of what can be achieved through it.
If you don't get to hung up on the noun 'god', you might find you have more common ground with a lot of people of faith than you realise.
It's a shame KayBee doesn't come visiting on the blogs. Rarely will you find a Human Spirit in better form, but she channels hers through what she calls 'god' and a brand of Christianity that doesn't stop her from taking on board ideas of Human Spirit (in it's better forms) from ther religions, or walks of life.
Do you think I can't see you trying every technique you can think of to justify your selfish belief in Trump, including the way you try to patronise me in an attempt to come across as having superior knowledge?
Perhaps that's the key to Trump support: he makes people feel like they can claim to be the bigliest and bestest without doing any work towards it.
Strictly speaking, 'organic' refers to anything containing carbon.
'Salt' for culinary use is sodium chloride, so it's has no carbon content.
'Organic' has more recently come to mean produce that has been created without the use of non-carbon fertilizers and other non-carbon treatments like pesticides.
An organic salt in chemistry is something like monosodium glutamate which contains an organic ion, but in marketing it tends to refer to table salt without additives like anti-caking agents.
If the soil from your pot plants, or in the environment is contaminated with inorganic substances like pesticides, or industrial waste, the salt washed out of the soil will likewise be contaminated.
The guards managing the Trump rally weren't armed.
It might have been more bloody had they been armed, but there'll be complaints about Pelosi all the same.
It doesn't really matter what the truth is; each side will make claims to suit their own agenda.
There's no real empathy for the woman who was shot. Her death is just a useful tool for those trying to ignore that some people chose to storm the Capital Building.
Trump was in it for the fame, adoration, power and money. It was all abut the Trump brand and self-affirmation. That's the way it is with somene who is persnality disordered as he is.
He couldn't possibly have been in it for the American people because he is unable to emotionally empathise with others. That is clear from his behaviour when he's not reading from a script. His astonishment at Prince Charles being involved in charity work is just one example of that.
He does have some level of cognitive empathy, however, which he uses to manipulate the greedy and intelligent, or the poor and ill-educated. He does that rather too well.
jac_the_gripper Blog Comments (2,986)
RE: Concerning the non existence of god
No, I've pretty much been trying to point out one distinction, but you don't seem to be able to grasp it.