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If Bedford is correct — and that steady state means 100,000 annual Covid deaths going forward, for at least the next several years — the two facts may be a bit hard to square in your mind. (Especially if you remember both the initial state of emergency the pandemic called into being and the more recent hope that it could at some point “be over.”) A hundred thousand deaths is more than the annual toll of any other infectious disease and would make Covid-19 a top-10 cause of death in the country — a major and novel cause of widespread death clouding the American horizon with another dark layer of morbidity we had never known before. It’s a few multiples of a typical flu season and more than die each year from diabetes, pneumonia or kidney disease. …
Mina compares the building of immunity to the learning of a language. “It’s a fact of the biology of immunity that it’s really hard to build a brand-new memory and keep it if you’re old,” he says. “And so I do think that for quite a while our elderly population is going to keep having really big problems because they just can’t retain these new memories.” People exposed today, who will become 80 years old in 25 years or so, won’t have the same problem, Mina says, because they will have built their immune memory at a younger age.
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Really liked the comparison of building immunity to the learning of a language. In a sense, the immune system learns things like the brain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/opinion/covid-19-deaths-vaccines-endemic.html
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