Endgame

      It can be a long, dull slog, especially if you're lousy chess player like me: the endgame.

      The SARS-CoV-2 endgame is looking that way, too: a bumpy road to endemicity, short or long.  As one of the interviewees puts it in this AP article, "We're not going to get to...2019 again."   I had hoped we could kill this bug dead, or at least knock it down as hard as we did with polio.  It's not going to happen.  COVID-19's going to get settled in, right next to the flu -- and shots for it will become as commonplace as yearly flu shots.

      Elsewhere, an illustration of the dangers of reading only the headlines.  That "study proving a single COVID-19 infection makes you immune for life?"  The guy in charge of the study says nope, that's not what we found.  The good news is, it does help some -- about like getting a single vaccine shot.  Of course, the vaccine is enormously less risky.

      How risky is too risky?  That "99% survivable" rate that gets bandied about for a COVID-19 infection?  An amusement-park roller-coaster can average 100 riders an hour.  If one rider died on it every hour, it's 99% survivable.  Who would line up for that?*
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* I have done the math for deaths connected to vaccination.  The very worst-case VAERS numbers give a 1 in 55,555 chance; using the confirmed death rate works out, very roughly, to less than one in 30 million.  Either is considerably better odds than one in a hundred.