I thought that we were past COVID parties until I read that a number of people in Alberta were hospitalized with COVID-19 after attending just such a party. And it brought back a flood of thoughts.
I could kind of understand the rationale behind COVID parties during the 1st wave when there were no vaccines and before hospitals were overwhelmed. We knew a lot less on the whole, there was nothing aside from infection that could afford you any form of immunity and so long as the healthcare system was stable your odds of survival were good. Also, given early estimates on when a vaccine would be available and the transmissibility of the disease it seemed like you were guaranteed to catch it anyway.
A lot has obviously changed since then. The biggest being that vaccines did arrive and arrived much sooner than expected. Also, mutations appear to have made things worse, and in many places the healthcare system is already in pretty bad shape.
The next thing I thought was how these sorts of things stem from a distrust of those spreading the information. And so I felt I should justify my position and my rationale for even holding one. I'm a computer scientist. That may not sound like it should carry any weight. However, part of attaining my degree involved a lot of university education in math, statistics and statistical analysis. Skills which I still use regularly. I am more qualified than an ER Nurse to talk about things like "exponential growth" or to discuss trends and statistics in data.
I have no training in epidemiology or virology. So, I don't talk about specific mutations or drugs or speculate much on things which might require a specialist knowledge in those fields. My understanding is limited to what data is out there of a statistical nature. I don't need a medical degree to evaluate the statistical data. With a lot of data out there however... it turns out, there is quite a bit I can form a strong stance on.
So, from a purely mathematical standpoint, here is my opinion on why COVID-19 parties are pure folly.
- Risk of serious illness is considerably higher with a COVID-19 infection.
- There is little research into the quality of immune response from infection survivors, but, the limited evidence present suggests two things; that the strongest responses are still robust than vaccination and that the strongest responses are only typically attained by those who suffered severe cases.
- Without vaccination and without herd immunity your odds of catching COVID-19 over time approach 100%.
- Your odds of any sort of reaction to a vaccine are astronomically low.
The mortality rate of COVID-19 is about 2%. The mortality rate from the mRNA vaccines available is in the ballpark of 1 in a million and the risk of any other serious outcome in general from an infection is also orders of magnitude lower than your risk of a serious outcome or death from catching the virus.
The only practical argument for not taking a vaccine (aside from medical reasons) would be if the risk of contracting the virus were so low, that it put the risks associated with it somewhere in the same ball park as the risks associated with vaccination.
However, as I've said, based on the rate of spread of this virus, unless something substantial changes, you're basically guaranteed to catch it sooner or later.
And, based on the research, even if you do catch it, it is unlikely to afford you any reasonable level of protection against reinfection unless you had a serious case (AKA, you were hospitalized).
In short relying on infection for immunity in the hopes of it meaning that you don't need a vaccine is... odd to say the least. You're engaging in a much more dangerous experiment by intentionally exposing your un-vaccinated body to the virus. There are far fewer studies and what ones exist don't paint a pretty picture.
And now I'm going to deviate from my area of expertise and talk about vaccines. The information here I've gathered from reports from experts in this field. As I'm paraphrasing a bit I don't guarantee that the specifics are 100% accurate. But, I am reasonably sure that the basic principle here is accurate.
So, without further ado, it might help to understand how vaccines can provide better immunity than actually encountering the real virus.
The key points here are; the virus doesn't want your body to learn to fight it off, your body may not get enough experience fighting it, and your body is trying to deal with the issue as quickly as possible, not necessarily as effectively as possible. The end result is that when you don't have a severe case or many exposures you may not develop enough of an immune response, or the one you develop may not be particularly effective.
Vaccines on the other hand are designed to deliver a dose large enough to elicit a strong response. And, in the case of mRNA vaccines they are even designed to provoke a very specific and effective response. Specifically, they are training the immune response to build proteins that will bind to the spike on the Coronavirus. Then, on top of all of that, vaccines are often administered in multiple doses to simulate a reinfection to the immune system to further bolster both the strength and duration of that protection.
So, while a vaccine in most people won't do much more than cause some tenderness, fatigue and perhaps a headache, to your immune system, it is as though your immune system is facing an infection to rival the most severe natural infections.
Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that what evidence is out there suggests that natural immunity isn't performing better than vaccination, even in cases where the infected were treated in ICUs. There are few guarantees on the quality of the immune response or how long the immunity will last.
So, attending a COVID party puts you at a high risk of contracting a virus that has a (comparatively) high risk of killing or hospitalizing you and won't necessarily protect you in the long run from facing similar odds or death or hospitalization. The alternative is to get a low risk injection which HAS shown itself to be very effective at preventing COVID from hospitalizing and killing people.
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