A number of medical specialists believe that the virus that causes Covid-19 is here to stay, no matter how much we adhere to effective vaccination efforts. That sounds grim, but that was the path taken by the other viruses that caused worldwide epidemics, killing millions of people in the past. We still get sick with influenza, for example, but we already shrug off the infection
The flu was as feared as Covid-19 in the past.
There are still questions left unanswered by the vaccines currently being used against the coronavirus. The most important question is on how much these vaccines prevent the transmission of the virus as this would determine if they could stop the virus in its tracks. Experts have agreed, however, that the vaccines prevent the sick from suffering a serious illness. That’s a good start.
It is when the illness caused by a virus causes millions of deaths that it disrupts society’s forward movement. But the coronavirus is still able to kill a number of people worldwide because a good number of those being infected are unvaccinated. Vaccination is one way for people to develop antibodies against the virus or to get immunity. The other way is to get sick with Covid and survive. The body will develop antibodies on its own to prevent reinfection or if reinfected the illness won’t be severe.
There are places, like Cebu, where the vaccination effort is slow. Thus, it has become difficult to stop the spread of the virus and the deaths it is causing. One way out of the pandemic therefore is vaccination. The other is to hope that the unvaccinated who get sick with it will survive and develop antibodies because of it. But that would be costly in human terms.
The goal is therefore to vaccinate as many people as we can and hope that the unvaccinated who get sick will survive. That will increase the number of people who will develop immunity from the virus until its ability to kill people will wane. There will still be surges in infections, but communities can already brush this off like they can now brush off the flu.
That does not mean the fight against the virus and its mutations will end. Big pharma will continue to develop vaccines against them and profit from the effort. Meaning countries and private entities will continue to spend money to get protection. The process that past societies went through with their own epidemics and pandemics will be repeated. But that is how it is.
But to lessen the pain, government needs to double its vaccination effort so that less unvaccinated people would get sick of the virus without protection and thus lessen the mortality rate. No government would want immunity by infection, true, but with the slow vaccination effort, it thus seems like it is one of the preferred ways out of this mess. Which is shameful.
I say that if the vaccines from the national government are slow in coming, then big local government units like Cebu City and Cebu Province should find ways to buy these with their available resources.