It is now clear that this thing is a right bastard in that a huge number of people may be carrying the infection but have little or no symptoms, perhaps a little sneeze, an occasional cough, and no fever. At this time of year particularly one just writes that off to a seasonal sniffle, not even a decent cold. Without a curfew these are the people who are happily spreading the virus and at risk of passing the infection to someone more vulnerable.

The lock down allows those people, the people infected with symptoms and in home quarantine, and those who have been hospitalised and make it through, to recover and develop immunity but it is going to take time for this to happen. Once there is a situation where there have been no new cases for a couple of weeks one can reasonably assume that a fair number of people are now immune and therefore the risk of spreading the virus has been greatly reduced. Not exactly the "herd immunity" but certainly better than no group immunity at all.

Tuberculosis is largely eradicated in the western world but can be brought in from countries that have lower health standards. Every so often a case pops up but fortunately it is not as virulent as CV19 and we now know how to treat TB. In time the rapidity of detection, lower infection rates, and an immunisation (that will probably be combined with or done at the same time as our annual flu shots) will all but eliminate the virus.

Hopefully it will ultimately be just a memory, similar to the memory of smallpox.

Peter

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