April 12th, 2020

​San Antonio Flattening the Curve
 
Our community is very anxious to get back to our regular lives and is growing a bit tired of being quarantined, and it may be statistically reasonable that most people will contract the coronavirus (most not seriously ill), flatting the curve might involve just getting back to normal. There are a few things we must consider when we jump back into “being normal”.
 
There might be a misconception that if most of the people that reside in San Antonio were to contract the coronavirus that herd immunity would start to take effect and therefore, slow the spread of the virus any further and that would resolve our issues. There are two ways of building immunity to a virus: naturally contracting and successfully fighting it off, and through a vaccine.
 
At the rate that new cases have been shown to spread, allowing people to contract the virus naturally and let their body build an immunity to it would be too risky for numerous reasons. In order to build immunity in this way, one would have to contract the virus, unlike a vaccine. This would put a considerable strain on the health care system here in San Antonio. Would we have enough doctors, nurses, and medical equipment to go around? For how long?
 
While herd immunity has been shown to be very beneficial in several circumstances, there are safe ways of going about building immunity (vaccines). There are still ongoing studies of developing a vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19, but nothing has been finalized just yet. If there were to be a vaccine that were to come out in the future, healthy individuals of our community would receive it in order to provide protection to our residents that are too ill to receive the vaccine. This would be our “herd immunity” for our residents in San Antonio.
 
So, before we all rush back to our “normal” lives again, please consider the facts:
Before you can build immunity, you must contract the virus There is no vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19 yet We must consider that we don’t know how each of us will react to the virus if we contract it The infection rate is very rapid and would strain our health care system possibly beyond what it could stand It is still unknown if someone can contract the virus more than once  
Be safe and think about what your current decisions will impact later San Antonio. We are all in this together.