(1) Normally healthy people being around sick people will increase the odds of the healthy catching the illness. I think this is basically John's point. If you've raised children you've likely experienced this, in spades. At least I have. Infants get ill almost continually as their immune systems are undeveloped. Parents are naturally around the infants and the parents tend to catch many more, and more bizarre, illnesses than they would otherwise.
(2) The governments of the world, and the media supposedly charged with sharing quality facts, demonstrated a remarkable inability to collect good data, much less to question and analyze it, throughout the Covid period. Why should we presume they've "magically" regained their ability to collect and analyze data now? Didn't Briben's recent unveil demonstrate fairly convincingly that the medical and journalistic endeavors are still brain dead with regard to these basics?
So, all we can do is try to go forward with personal experience, and stories, and stories of stories, since Covid "mysteriously" affected the ability of "scientists" and "journalists" to think competently.
I'm not saying your personal experience isn't valid, but it doesn't provide enough data -- in particular -- to separate the illness rate of the Vexed from the Unvexed. So, healthy people may, indeed, also be experiencing more illness ... but maybe not at the same rates, nor degree of severity, as the Vexed.
(3) Depression lowers immune response, quite significantly. We live in depressing times. Indeed, factoring in that the inflation rate has unambiguously been way above the supposed "growth of GDP" since, at least 2020, we are actually in a prolonged, and rather bad, economic Recession.
Indeed, I think it would clearly be in what people 100 years ago would clearly recognize and label as an Economic DEPRESSION. How nice that our Government and their apparatchiks have made it impossible to ever again have an Economic Depression, by "disappearing" the definition of the term. Just go ahead and try to find a clear definition and distinction, to see what I mean.
Re: Population Immunity
(1) Normally healthy people being around sick people will increase the odds of the healthy catching the illness. I think this is basically John's point. If you've raised children you've likely experienced this, in spades. At least I have. Infants get ill almost continually as their immune systems are undeveloped. Parents are naturally around the infants and the parents tend to catch many more, and more bizarre, illnesses than they would otherwise.
(2) The governments of the world, and the media supposedly charged with sharing quality facts, demonstrated a remarkable inability to collect good data, much less to question and analyze it, throughout the Covid period. Why should we presume they've "magically" regained their ability to collect and analyze data now? Didn't Briben's recent unveil demonstrate fairly convincingly that the medical and journalistic endeavors are still brain dead with regard to these basics?
So, all we can do is try to go forward with personal experience, and stories, and stories of stories, since Covid "mysteriously" affected the ability of "scientists" and "journalists" to think competently.
I'm not saying your personal experience isn't valid, but it doesn't provide enough data -- in particular -- to separate the illness rate of the Vexed from the Unvexed. So, healthy people may, indeed, also be experiencing more illness ... but maybe not at the same rates, nor degree of severity, as the Vexed.
(3) Depression lowers immune response, quite significantly. We live in depressing times. Indeed, factoring in that the inflation rate has unambiguously been way above the supposed "growth of GDP" since, at least 2020, we are actually in a prolonged, and rather bad, economic Recession.
Indeed, I think it would clearly be in what people 100 years ago would clearly recognize and label as an Economic DEPRESSION. How nice that our Government and their apparatchiks have made it impossible to ever again have an Economic Depression, by "disappearing" the definition of the term. Just go ahead and try to find a clear definition and distinction, to see what I mean.
-gnat