If I withdraw £10, I get all of that £10s. Just as if troops withdraw, they don't leave some people. Or if my wife and I decide to withdraw from a conversation, one of us doesn't stay.
And yes, if I decide to withdraw all of my checking account from an ATM, I get... all of it.
"Withdraw" doesn't imply partial things. What you choose to withdraw, you withdraw.
Covid is here to stay, and you can be expect to be infected with it every few years. You probably won't even know it's covid because we will have stopped routine testing. Talk about having zero cases is ridiculous and fanciful.
The broad logic is more infections = more variants. Which makes sense in a purely statistical way, since variants are happened upon by chance on infection.
It seems the messaging from the experts is different in the US and the UK.
The message in the UK broadly is: expect to be infected with COVID multiple times throughout your life, vaccination and prior infection should protect you from serious illness.
One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.
But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.
That's probably the more realistic expectation. Especially when the west is doing very, very little to help curb infections elsewhere in the world. Until they become interested in that there will always be a fresh supply of variants arriving.
Church (genuine suggestion for anyone)
We often have non Christians turning up to our church for one reason or another.
A non Christian comes every week because he loves the people. You can find churches with members on either side of the political spectrum if you worry about that.
One thing I love is that (almost) wherever I am travelling in the world, I can just turn up to a church and feel welcomed.
My wife and I moved to a new city and went to church and were invited to a family home for dinner straight after the service. It's great to experience that in a city where you don't know a single person.
As an atheist (raised Catholic), I can recommend Unitarian Universalist congregations as generally very welcoming and friendly places. They're pretty common in the northeast US at least.
I wanted a FAANG job so I followed on Twitter every engineer I could find from the company I wanted to work at. Reading them every day gave me the impression that I too had to be popular on Twitter to get a job there.
I got the job and soon realised that no one I work with is a Twitter personality. I'm not aware of anyone I work with having a social media presence at all. These are some of the world's best engineers, they do hugely influential work and outside of their colleagues no one has ever heard of them.
When you're on Twitter you get the impression that the whole world is there and anyone who isn't there is not relevant.
There are thousands of engineers where I work, why did I think that you had to be a Twitter personality just based on a few dozen people I could find on Twitter?
Brent Simmons noted this on his blog after joining Audible:
> "I haven’t noticed that the people I work with have a lot of public social media presence. (Maybe I just haven’t gotten clued-in yet?)"
The majority of people don't use Twitter at all. Of those who do, the majority aren't Twitter "personalities".
I deleted my Twitter account and haven't looked back.
Australia's influenza modelling had plans for this style of lockdown prepared long before the 'rona hit. So you are right, this model did not shut down the global economy. If anything did, it was China's demonstration that such a lockdown could actually work.
