Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Human behavior plays a big role. What it wants to do isn't a mystery. It wants to replicate. There are behaviors that humans can take to slow down its replication. If there had been a concerted effort, we could have controlled its replication, and cut down on the infections. ... and prevented hunreds of thousands, if not more, people who ended up on ventilators and died.

Our unwillingness to universally practice those behaviors very likely made things much worse for ourselves. If the virus is able to replicate, it will mutate with the sole goal of those mutatations being. ... replication. And the fact that we didn't stem the replication and new infections of the original virus better led to mutations and new variants that caused even more sickness and death. Namely delta. We undoubtedly made things worse because of our unwillingess to alter our behavior to a greater degree than we did.

That notion of "Nothing we can do," is not supported by all of the evidence we have. Masks do prevent transmission. Avoiding group gatherings does prevent transmission. We just didn't do those things nearly well enough, nearly long enough, nearly universally enough, to get the upper hand over the virus. If we had and then people had gotten vaccinated en masse, it's a very fair bet that the virus would have done something completely different than what it actually did. ... with our behavior having been the factor that made things different (and better).