175 people attended a Biogen conference in Boston on Feb 26, 2020. One of them brought Covid-19 from Europe. Over 100 left with it. They spread the virus to most of Massachusetts and beyond. Eventually, that strain of the virus infected a few hundred thousand people.
The conference was a super-spreader. Early in the pandemic, there were others: Mardi Gras, a choir practice in Seattle, weddings, funerals.
10 days before Biogen, I was at the Dance Flurry in Saratoga Springs NY. It’s five thousand people dancing and having fun in crowded rooms. People mingle, talk, breathe hard. They come from all over the US and Canada, plus a few other countries. Contra dance is the perfect way to spread a virus.
The Flurry dodged a bullet. At the time there only were 15 confirmed cases in the US. However, testing was sparse back then. The actual number probably was in the hundreds or thousands. Pure luck that none of them attended. It would have turned the weekend into a super-super-spreader event. Big enough to totally change the trajectory of Covid-19. The pandemic might have roared into the US a week or two sooner, with everyone even less prepared.
All contra dances shut down in March 2020, along with many other group events. This year they are inching back slowly.
For the first few years of attending dance festivals, I’d always catch a generic cold/flu at them. Then it tapered off. Recently, I was down to just one cold every two years. Maybe being exposed to every possible virus has its benefits. Keep the immune system on its toes.
This summer I’ll attend an outdoor festival and a few smaller events. It will be strange, after more than two years of social distancing. Most likely I’ll catch Covid-19 at some point, as life grows more normal. With luck, masks plus the second booster will be enough to prevent extreme sickness and/or Long Covid.
As many people are finding out, catching this new virus doesn’t add much immunity. It’s easy to have it more than once. Ditto for any respiratory virus. I think that happens because they infect mucous membranes. Those are expendable cells that divide quickly, die young and slough off along with the slime they produce. It’s how your body keeps danger away from the more important bits. Your immune system doesn’t take upper respiratory cells very seriously because their turnover is so fast.
Vaccines are more effective because they inject into the body interior. Your immune system freaks right out when it spots foreign matter in muscle or bloodstream. A hefty bout of pneumonia is another way to ramp up the memory B-cells, but that’s a risky way to become immune. Better to learn it from the fake version.
Meanwhile, it’s tick season. Right now, Lyme Disease is a bigger worry than Covid. A vaccine for it came out in 1998, right when the anti-vax movement started. Sales crashed, and it was discontinued in 2002. I’m resentful about that, every time I find nymphs and/or bulls-eye rashes. It’s growing worse every year.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
