There's a theory that children tend to do things like eat their boogers and dirt, cough on each other, avoid bath time, etc because being sick as a youngster confers an evolutionary advantage. Children who are exposed to a greater variety of foreign 'threats' tend to be more likely to make it to adulthood (or at least, reproductive age). Granted, not all of them survive this early exposure, but the long-term consequence is that early heavy testing of the immune system has a better overall survival ratio than cloistered, sterile children. Over time, the 'grosser' humans survived, and the clean ones . . . didn't.
Populations ebb and flow, so you can either have a fairly regular die off by allowing some degree of infection and illness, or you can attempt to keep every single person alive for as long as possible and end up with plagues and pandemics that kill off in mass numbers. Or we can live in isolation forever until humanity dies, miserable and alone.
The notion that we can somehow outsmart reality and avoid any unfortunate death ever is an interesting one, but not one I'd be putting my money on.
Try your best to be healthy and live well, and live with the knowledge that no day is guaranteed. It's about balance and weighing up risks.
But frankly, this whole idea that your fear constitutes sufficient justification to restrict my life, makes me fear people more than the pandemic. It reminds me of the 90s and the War on Drugs, where people were claiming to totally know someone who smoked marijuana once and died immediately, and that was justification to promote intrusive laws about random searches, drug-testing at work, locking up violators for years and giving them felony records - all in the name of 'protecting other people'.
Children, just like adults, will get sick. Some of them will die. But until I see parents stop feeding their kids cheetos and cola, and drivers start driving under the speed limit, I can't buy into this pretense that they've done all they can to keep others safe and now the rest of us have to give up our freedom to go for a walk without a mask on.
Populations ebb and flow, so you can either have a fairly regular die off by allowing some degree of infection and illness, or you can attempt to keep every single person alive for as long as possible and end up with plagues and pandemics that kill off in mass numbers. Or we can live in isolation forever until humanity dies, miserable and alone.
The notion that we can somehow outsmart reality and avoid any unfortunate death ever is an interesting one, but not one I'd be putting my money on.
Try your best to be healthy and live well, and live with the knowledge that no day is guaranteed. It's about balance and weighing up risks.
But frankly, this whole idea that your fear constitutes sufficient justification to restrict my life, makes me fear people more than the pandemic. It reminds me of the 90s and the War on Drugs, where people were claiming to totally know someone who smoked marijuana once and died immediately, and that was justification to promote intrusive laws about random searches, drug-testing at work, locking up violators for years and giving them felony records - all in the name of 'protecting other people'.
Children, just like adults, will get sick. Some of them will die. But until I see parents stop feeding their kids cheetos and cola, and drivers start driving under the speed limit, I can't buy into this pretense that they've done all they can to keep others safe and now the rest of us have to give up our freedom to go for a walk without a mask on.
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