Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2022/01/19/a-folk-singer-who-wanted-to-acquire-natural-immunity-is-now-dead-of-covid-19.html
…
3 Likes
Unfortunately where this theory falls apart is that there are many examples from real life of people getting COVID and having no major long term problems. Luckily we can use numbers to evaluate this situation and not rely on our emotions.
12 Likes
I guess the Czech Republic now has someone to name their version of the Herman Cain Award after.
Or maybe we can give the Hana Horka Award to any Covidiot anywhere who dies because they bought into New Age/“wellness” woo (as distinct from becoming members of a fascist death cult).
16 Likes
The text doesn’t say whether she went out of her way to catch it but if she did, I suspect the viral load would have been a lot higher than it would have been for someone catching it on public transport or something. A dangerous strategy.
6 Likes
35 Likes
To be fair, she is now immune.
17 Likes
She’s certainly not getting it again, so maybe the joke’s on us?
7 Likes
The linked article is quite clear, she decided to not isolate when others in her household (vaccinated) had breakthru cases hoping to enjoy natural immunity.
5 Likes
I chalk it up to innumeracy: in this case, she misjudged the chances of catching it, the chances it could turn bad, the chances it could prove fatal in comparison to the chances of getting it once you have been vaccinated.
We humans are simply bad at any math that doesn’t fall into our limited comparison range.
3 Likes
Science education failure and intentional misinformation are at play, too. I’m no molecular biologist, but it didn’t take a whole lot of reading to understand that this class of virus mutates quickly, why an mRNA vaccine can be a real game-changer that’s been under development for 15+ years, and that microchips are significantly larger than hypodermic needles (the whole “5G chips” thing just makes me headdesk so hard).
13 Likes
Immunity is immunity, your body doesn’t care where the immunity came from.
3 Likes
For example I am always amazed how many people consider Russian roulette odds perfectly fine in other contexts even if the stakes are substantial there, too.
3 Likes
Says you.
16 Likes
Thanks.
My point was that it’s all “natural” as far as your body is concerned. Vaccination is really just using how your immune system naturally works.
3 Likes
Unfortunately for the folk singer, nature is acquiring immunity to idiots.
4 Likes
14 Likes
It doesn’t matter how you catch it or how many virions you were exposed too. One infected cell will produce about 50 virions starting from about 7 hours of infection to about 36 hours of infection. Each of those virons have a chance of infecting other cells in the host or been released to the air and infecting new hosts. A high number of virons in the air will increase the chance of catching covid. After 48 hours it does not really matter if you were infected with one or 5000 virons you are still going to have millions of virons in you.
Once infected the viral load, a measurement of the number of virions in a host, is determined by the immune system. It has been reported that the viral load for immunized people is lower than unvaccinated people. However, the amount of virons they release into the air has been reported to be similar.
That’s a long winded way of saying it doesn’t matter how you catch it, the consequences are the same for you as an individual, but trying to catch it is a dangerous strategy.
3 Likes
The difference between your two scenarios is that in one the body has an extra 48 hours to ramp up the immune system to fight the disease. That’s a massive difference, often resulting in significantly different consequences.
2 Likes
On the other side vaccine deniers have lots of “examples” of people dying from the vaccine.
Short answer, I’m wrong, it looks like that the infectious dose, number of virons you are exposed to, may correlate with disease outcome but it is not know by how much plus there are other factors in play too.
In my back of the envelope calculations by 48 hours there would be similar number of virons, so many it doesn’t matter any more. The actual time difference getting to say a billion virons is only 6 hours. A difference in infection of 1 to 500,000 virons would give the body a 24 hour advantage. Or an infectious dose of 100 virons to a million. Lots of assumptions made in those calculations by the way as I am presuming all virons produced successfully infect a new cell which would not be the case by any stretch of the imagination. The time from infection to infectious is reported to be 3+ days so it is obviously taking longer than the theoretical doubling rate to reach significant numbers.
An infections dose is estimated to be about 100 virons. For other similar virus there is increased morbidity and lethality reported with increasing dose at exposure. However, it is currently unknown for SARS-CoV-2. There are other correlating factors too, BMI, diabetes etc.
2 Likes
