As we noted on February 3^rd, while other places, including entire countries, are reducing or eliminating COVID-19 restrictions, Philadelphia’s tinpot dictators want to keep restrictions in place for months. Even worse, when school districts in Pennsylvania, but outside of Philadelphia, were so graciously granted permission to make masking optional, some overly worried parents sued the schools, trying to require that the mask mandates be kept in place, and federal Judge Wendy Beetlestone ordered the Perkiomen Valley School District to keep masking in place, granting a preliminary injunction sought by parents of children with disabilities that put them at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

If masks work, why wouldn’t such masks worn by the children with health issues protect them? Why must other people, hundreds of other people, be required to wear masks to protect these three children? Why must the whole school wear masks, rather than only the children and staff in the individual rooms in which the vulnerable students are seated?

It was one line in this article, from National Public Radio — not exactly an evil reich wing site — which puts things in perspective: “eventually, every one of us will get infected.”

The future of the pandemic is looking clearer as we learn more about infection

by Michaeleen Doucleff | February 7, 2022 | 5:00 AM ET

During the early days of the pandemic, scientists and doctors were concerned that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 might not trigger a strong immune response in many people – thus an infection might not provide long-term protection.

“Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests,” a headline from The Guardian alerted back in July 2020. “King’s College London team found steep drops in patients’ antibody levels three months after infection,” the story warned.

But that idea was based on preliminary data from the laboratory — and on a faulty understanding of how the immune system works. Now about a year and a half later, better data is painting a more optimistic picture about immunity after a bout of COVID-19. In fact, a symptomatic infection triggers a remarkable immune response in the general population, likely offering protection against severe disease and death for a few years.

And if you’re vaccinated on top of it, your protection is likely even better, studies are consistently showing.

Here are several key questions people have been asking throughout the pandemic – and ones that researchers are beginning to answer.

If I just had COVID, am I protected against getting a severe course of COVID in the future ?

With SARS-CoV-2, your immune system generates two types of protection: protection against reinfection and protection against severe illness upon that second infection. Let’s start with the latter.

If you’re under age 50 and healthy, then a bout of COVID-19 offers good protection against severe disease if you were to be infected again in a future surge, says epidemiologist Laith Abu-Raddad, at Weill-Cornell Medical-Qatar. “That’s really important because eventually, every one of us will get infected,” he says. “But if reinfections prove to be more mild, in general, it will allow us to live with this pandemic in a much easier way.”

“Eventually, every one of us will get infected.” Dr abu-Raddad isn’t the only one to tell us this, as Dr Anthony Fauci, the attention whore who has driven so much of US policy, has admitted, as has Dr Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, and others.

On January 10 alone, more than 1.3 million Americans tested positive, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 0.4% of the country’s total population. (In. One. Day.) Even with about 75% of Americans vaccinated, breakthrough cases are becoming super common since the omicron variant is so rampant and spreads so easily. Omicron is responsible for 98.3% of new COVID-19 cases in the United States last week, per CDC estimates shared on Tuesday.

Abroad, people and hospitals are getting hit hard as well. The World Health Organization estimates that 50% of Europeans will contract the coronavirus within the next two months if cases continue on their current trend.

With the current Xi Omicron variant generally leading to milder forms of the coronavirus, the obvious question becomes: if everyone will become infected, and infection helps protect people from subsequent infections and disease, isn’t it better to go ahead and get that done now, rather than when a more serious variant emerges?

The three kids in Perkiomen Valley with chronic health problems? Yeah, they’re going to contract the virus, too. Even if a federal judge forces the hundreds of other people in the school to wear masks all day long, they’ll contract the virus anyway, as life continues and the virus evades virtually all measures to stop its spread. It may be more serious for them, it may even be fatal for them, but if everybody is going to be exposed to the virus, they are part of everybody.