We Don't Know Anything

I've been saying this for a while, but WE 👏 DON'T 👏 KNOW 👏 ANYTHING 👏 ABOUT 👏 THIS 👏 VIRUS 👏 There is no way to say with certainty who is most likely to become infected, what happens to them, how they may recover, or what the long term effects will be months or years down the road.

This thing has been around for a matter of months. Most of that time has been spent putting out fires, not taking time to research it in a meaningful way. Yes, we have a lot of smart people and great technology that's enabled us to quickly map its genome and track it as it changes and spreads, but we really don't know much about how to fight it yet, and are discovering new things all the time.

I just read a couple of scary articles that made me totally lose my appetite for lunch. Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the body, in the Washington Post, kind of rounds up all the latest symptoms that have been coming to light. This isn't just a respiratory disease, you might be able to breathe just fine and not have a fever, yet be dying from COVID-19. It affects all the systems of your body in a number of horrifying ways. And lest you think it's just a disease for the elderly, there's also new cases of children who are having different types of reactions. And even the adults who are dying aren't old and sickly and on their way out - a study found they could have expected to live another 10 years.

Finally, I also saw this article, Scientists concerned that coronavirus is adapting to humans. We've known for a while that there are different strains of the virus, and some of the changes may affect some of the elements that vaccines and other treatments are trying to target. The more it gets around, the more chances it has to mutate. The comments on this article are kind of horrifying, as expected, but there is one person who said, "the virus may mutate itself to extinction." (In this and his comments on some other articles he insinuates this is what happened with SARS.) Wouldn't that be nice..?