I dont know how variants and a forever virus is his worst nightmare if he went for short-term gains by trying to flatten the curve. Long-term, we gave the virus more time to leap person to person in the time we could've if we let the virus go free.

See, there was once a single virus cell that replicated... the variants we have now are due to leaping into weakened immune systems and giving the virus more "time" to adapt before it replicates by flattening the curve.

So, when you flatten the curve like we did, we gave the virus a ton of time to not only infect the weakened immunities of some, but also leap linearly. When a virus goes person-to-perso n and each person "only" infects 2-10 people, then it needs exponentially more people to "go through" to reach heard immunity.

Contrasted with one person infecting 100s, the virus doesnt have a chance to have as many iterations before herd immunity...

1 Nope. Whether the virus spread fast or slow is irrelevant. The total spread will be the same. The variable is how sick people get. It causes more victims if people have few and/or mild symptoms. It causes fewer if people have sever symptoms, because people who are not sick avoid those who are.

We are, however, increasing the pandemic and promoting variants now, and we are doing it because the vaccine is permitting infection and suppressing the degree of symptoms. Milder illness promotes spread, and more victims means virus has more chance to mutate.

Number or pace of victims is irrelevant, degree of symptomology is what makes the difference. "Flattening the curve” did not affect the degree of symptomology. The vaccine does.

2 The longer a disease has to germinate in it's host the more it mutates and thus the longer any epidemic. We should have let this thing run it's course. The whole point of herd immunity is to let the young and healthy catch it and break the chain of contagion before it mutates.

3 Viruses do not recognize time, and "flattening the curve" did not mean that the virus was alive in any one victim ("germinating in the host") for longer than it would have been without that policy. A person ill from the virus will be ill for a certain period regardless of what the government is doing.

Mutation and spread is a matter of the degree of symptoms. If a person is showing severe illness, people who are not ill will avoid him and will not become infected by him. A virus that creates major symptoms, therefor, dies out fairly quickly.

If a person’s symptoms are not sufficiently severe to warn people off, he will infect many and the virus will spread far and wide. That virus thrives.

In neither case is time part of the equation. The difference is the nature of the symptoms caused by the virus.

Yes, we should have let it run its course. What we did caused massive social and economic loss. Quarantine means isolating those who are ill. Never in history has quarantine meant isolating those who are well so as to prevent them from becoming ill. That concept in insane. It made society vastly worse off, but it did not make the health impact worse.

What is making the health impact worse is a vaccine that is advertised as preventing infection, but does not actually do so. It allows infection and suppresses symptoms, "reduces the risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death,” creating the scenario where people who are not sick do not avoid those who are, and infection spreads at a far greater rate as a result.

4 However the virus operates -- and I believe Bill is correct as to the virus' behavior -- since, after all, the virus' objective is to thrive -- I ask you gentlemen this one question: do you think our ever-so-wise government (spit) would have generated the same response to COVID had that virus reared its ugly head during the administration of, say, Obama, Clinton, or even Bush? But especially either of the first two...

5 Obama, probably yes. Clinton and Bush, probably not. The single minded goal of all of them Clintonm, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, is the acquisition and retention of power. They care about nothing else and pay attention to nothing else. Clinton and Bush existed in a era when that pursuit had to be kept covered to some degree. You had to alt least pretend to care about people. Your lies had to be believable. Obama started the trend toward the naked, open power grab. Trump was the same, but as rich as he was he didn't need to be quite as greedy. Now they have so emasculated the voter that they do not even need to make their lies believable.

6 Bill, I agree that "flattening the curve" did no good. You and I disagree on the principle of amplification. It's fairly well accepted that a virus thrives by having the time to spread; too slow and it fails to spread, too fast and it fails to spread. That's why Ebola has never had the kind of breakout we've seen with other viruses of that nature; it kills too fast.

So if enough people who are healthy catch it in a relatively short time the virus has nowhere to go. It chokes out. Much like a nuclear reaction, there is a critical mass. BUT if it has plenty of time, leisurely moving from one person to the next as this has (since we "flattened the curve") not only will it keep spreading but it will have the time and the pressure to mutate. That's really pretty standard epidemiology, and we've ignored it.

Other than that I agree with you. Our efforts to "fight the virus" were at best useless. We should have just let it run it's course and be done.