What is "Heard Immunity"?

[Taem]

and a large number of people are too petulant or inconsiderate to take measures to keep others from getting sick

It is difficult when a person (speaking mainly for myself here) PERSONALLY knows over 30-people who have had COVID from working in a fast passed restaurant chain as a regional manager overseeing eight stores, and every single one of the infected had mild to no symptoms, most only getting checked out for COVID because their boyfriend or girlfriend tested positive, or they felt slightly under the weather. Not a single one was hospitalized. These 30 individual people I personally know had families, and while their stories are anecdotal to me, it did not make it any less true and it so happens that in a single household, an average of 50% of the people in it got COVID from the infected person while the other 50% did not. Of the over 100 people in this small group, only one woman died who was 84, obese, high-risk diabetes, and on dialysis. I knew the information coming out of the media was incorrect from day 1 when they made the claim that COVID had an over a 3% mortality rate, and yet on those cruize ships with over 300 passangers each, only one person died. Or those military ships where everyone got COVID and nobody died. It was clear right from the start those numbers did not add up, so forgive me for being a bit cynical but while I was holed up in one of our stores doing to-go's only because our entire staff was furloughed, I watched a lot of news on the TV back then.

And when anyone brings up these inconsistencies, instead of having a reasonable conversation about it, people take a hard-line and become immediately aligned one-way or the other accusing the other side of being a conspiracy theorist, forgetting there is a middle ground of logic and debate. That is what causes somebody like me to become petulant in nature... the knee-jerk reaction of fanatics frothing at the mouth to expunge all non-believers... and it comes from BOTH SIDES OF THE ROPE! So fuck everyone who gets up on a soap box and cannot discuss logic! YOU are part of the problem, not the solution! (Thankfully, most Lurkers here have been patient and thoughtful in their reasoning). A quick example, there is apparently serious discussions happening now in congress deliberating the possibility COVID was manufactured in a lab; the idea was initially denounced last year with anyone speaking about it blasted to dust by frothing fanatics because people are stupid and cannot discuss things logically anymore, but have to be right-right-right, all the time! Anyway, what is the new mortality rate now? Looks like in the US it is 1.8% and worldwide it is 1.4%, which actually matches my own personal experience.

So what I really wanted to say was, in a perfect world, when you feel sick, if you are considerate of others you would wear a mask and social distance. The REALITY with COVID however is that most of the people I know who tested positive for COVID, including family members, felt either mild symptoms they attributed to seasonal allergies, or nothing at all. And I can't even image all of the people who DID NOT GET TESTED because they had no symptoms... And that seems to be the real disconnect here, and it is so frustrating! Why should we as a society be punitively forced to wear masks and social distance when we do not feel sick and have no symptoms? Never before in the history of this great country in the United States has the well and unaffected been forced to quarantine! This infringes upon so many of our rights, and is edging closer to a nation without freedoms, where everyone is so bent on supporting what ideology they believe is right, they never stopped to ask if we should be doing this in the first place. Now that the narrative for vaccines is in place, I see more and more of our civil liberties slowly eroding away and if you do not see it, then you are blind!

And of course, on the flip side you have Jesters argument that without mandatory vaccinations, the virus will continue to mutate and never go away and millions more people will die. That is a tough pill to swallow, but he is also right. And so we are caught at a crossroads of losing our liberties to chase the COVID demon away. COVID is not like the pox or flu. Most people I have met do not feel sick at all, so you cannot count on infected individuals to wear masks and social distance when they feel sick, because they may never know they have it. So do you force everyone to stay indoors? To get vaccinated if they want to fly, enter a government building, or go to school? We set a precedence here and if you remove the word COVID from it, the very concept becomes alarming... A pandoras box was opened by giving our governments so much power to arbitrarily shut things down when they make the claim their citizens are threatened in some way, to enact new laws and restrictions on travel, where they can and can't enter, what they wear on their faces, how close they can get to others... even who they can talk to. It is easy to turn the cheek and say, "but COVID...", but I say look past that word, because I honestly believe this is why people are so divided! Because there is more to this issue than just COVID. And the fanatics (on both sides) preaching from their soapboxes with their heads so high in the clouds they cannot hear the voices down below them, those are the ones that make me petulant.

I want to thank all of you Lurkers so far who have patiently helped explain many things to me; I am grateful for that! I am always willing to learn, and open enough to reverse my opinion where I can see my sources were incorrect. Bolty once posted a cartoon strip featuring a bird that really got me thinking how people can get stuck in a thought process without realizing it and become unwilling to change. I sincerely hope you all keep an open mind as well as we enter these uncertain times. I want to say that my own personal experiences may or may not reflect the reality of the majority of individuals in this world, so take it with a grain of salt. Peace, it was not my intention to offend anybody with my post. I think there are many aspects to this COVID pandemic and people want to simplify it, but it is not something that can be simplified. There is a lot at stake. And this is why people have such strong opinions about it!