The very recommendation of Flattening The Curve for a mutating airborne disease represents a complete misunderstanding
of the underlying disease, and how we have made cold-and-flu less deadly every year
for our last 2 million years upright.
It is apparent in Covid-19 data from around the world, that countries that have taken the most steps to
Flatten The Curve have seen the
most of their own people die, and ones with fewer restrictions on their populations are saving countless more lives.
But how does Flattening The Curve actually kill more people?
The answer lies in the nature of mutating airborne diseases, and their interaction with us over millenia.
The concept of a Virus-Year helps to explain
how quickly viruses can evolve beyond their parents,
by showing that every 6 hours in one host cell can produce one generation,
or 20 Virus-Years of variants - equal to what humans can produce in 20 years.
This means that from a given source virus, perhaps a more virulent form that we would rather people not get,
in 30 hours, one person can produce 5 generations of virus strains that have evolved
past that original strain by about a Virus-Century, or 100 Virus-Years.
When one person spreads it to another, the virus is then picking up in the new person where it left off in the other person,
with a version spreading that has already evolved a Virus-Century from the source.
What then happens at group events, is that different combinations of exposure in different people
lead to chains of evolution that can rapidly lead to strains that are
Virus-Millenia, or thousands of Virus-Years, beyond the variant
we were concerned about.
Individuals get exposure to viruses already evolved hundreds, if not thousands, of Virus-Years from the source,
and can miss out on exposure to anything earlier or in between.
As the viruses evolve further and further away from the source,
it becomes more and more likely that behaviors found in the source will no longer be found
in the current strains - they will have evolved.
When you Flatten The Curve, or try to avoid spreading the virus, what happens is that everyone eventually
encounters a variant of the source virus that is minimally evolved, perhaps just a few Virus-Centuries
from the source, which would be a strain that would still have a substantial amount
of the same behaviors as the original.
It is possible that entire chains of evolution that would have brought the virus to lower deadliness
are lost without people being able to get that version that would be less of a threat to people's lives.
The work that all those people had done in fighting the worst strain, and turning it into a less deadly virus,
is effectively thrown away, and we have to start over again from scratch, using a variant
close to that original deadly strain.
By Flattening The Curve, you ensure that your entire population will eventually encounter the
worst form of the virus, the one you were supposedly trying to stop.
This is how you kill more people - by maintaining airborne disease at its deadliest,
closest to the source, instead of letting it evolve
into something different, that will ultimately be less deadly.
