A musing Beam

This is the fourth installment in a series about COVID-19 .  Here's the summary on vaccines:  If things go as well as possible, we'll have some vaccines available in the US around the beginning of 2021, they will likely require two shots, and they will probably work well enough.  Lots of people won't get the vaccine, though, so there may still be many more preventable deaths.  And the timelines could definitely be pushed to the middle of 2021. Here is a decent FAQ-style primer with lots of links if you want deeper dives. What is a vaccine and how does it work? A vaccine is a medicine that, unlike most others, actually prevents you from getting sick .  The major pathway for a vaccine to achieve this is through stimulating your immune system to produce antibodies that are ready in case you are exposed in the future.  Basically, your body thinks it was already sick and is able to fight the disease off. More specifically , vaccines usually have particles called antigens that t

Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining This is the third installment in a series on COVID-19 . How do you deal with an epidemic? A respiratory disease epidemic ends after each person consistently spreads it to fewer than 1 person, on average.  That can happen in many ways . Y ou can choose not to try to stop it, depending on factors like its severity and method of spreading.  If it isn't bad enough and there is no immunity from getting it, it might be reasonable to just let it keep going, and just get used to it. Or maybe it is really bad, but still there is no immunity, so you still just get used to it and treat the symptoms, like with HIV . You might also let it keep going if it isn't that deadly and people become immune once they get it.  Reaching so-called "herd immunity" takes enough people in the population having it that the remaining carriers have almost nobody to spread it to.  Current speculation is that COVID-19 would need 70% to 90%  of people to get t