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This is such a strange virus, the way it can affect one person so much more significantly than another, even when other health issues are seemingly equal, or even  better, for an affected person.

My 81-year-old FIL with diabetes and major obesity, had very mild symptoms.  Other people that you'd think would fare better, suffer greatly.  Makes it even more difficult to treat.

This is such a strange virus, the way it can affect one person so much more significantly than another, even when other health issues are seemingly equal, or even  better, for an affected person.

My 81-year-old FIL with diabetes and major obesity, had very mild symptoms.  Other people that you'd think would fare better, suffer greatly.  Makes it even more difficult to treat.

My 70 y/o financial advisor sailed right through. Only a sore throat. Never hospitalized.

My 70 y/o former neighbor is in the ICU with Covid pneumonia right now. Being treated with steroids and remdisivir. It's working, but he'll be in the ICE for at least 10 days. No vent.

Neither had any comorbidities, other than age.

Now the question is do I need the vaccine, and if so, why? 

You might need it for the paperwork to travel on an airline etc. and get in some countries.  AS for medical need, I don't know.

In looking at all this, and given the inevitable mutations, did our experts severely underestimate what we're up against??? Despite all our efforts to mask up, socially distance, close our economies, shelter in place, unveiling a vaccine, etc - 10 months later we're LOSING worse than ever.

IMHO the mutations are another argument against the natural herd immunity strategies that folks were espousing. 

Viruses are going to mutate. That's what they do. However mutations are a numbers game--the more hosts you have, the more spread you have, the more likely it is that you'll see mutations that are positive [for the virus] adaptations which then spread. 

So now we seem to have something so transmissible that it's defeating the mitigation efforts that might have contained less transmissible versions. 

I'll be getting the vaccine as soon as it's available to me. I have no desire to wait any longer than I have to at this point.

BTW my wife had no additional side effects from her first dose [Moderna] beyond pretty severe soreness of her arm. 

we can always hope the vaccines developed by the Chinese, Russians, and others might be effective

more than just 3 or 4 vaccines out there

might take 5 or 6 to do the job

Can't speak for anyone else, but I was only commenting on natural herd immunity as the ultimate strategy because I didn't believe effective vaccines could be deployed in time.

And I'm still skeptical as to whether or not the vaccines that have been developed will be effective across the entire global population, and against all mutations of the virus currently existing, and the strains that will likely evolve in the future.

I might be wrong about that-- I certainly hope I'm wrong about that-- but it doesn't change the fact that right now we're about 5 minutes into the first quarter of this battle against the virus and we have no idea how the next 55 minutes are going to unfold.

I was thinking more of the people like the Great Barrington Declaration.

IMHO the "well we're just all gonna have to get the disease" of course made sense if we'd never have an effective vaccine, but for reasons I've talked about at length here I think the death toll of this "focused protection" would be staggering, and that natural herd immunity is worst-case scenario.

But even then I hadn't really considered the mutation portion. I was considering the COVID we knew, and not really contemplating the fact that every virus host is a potential mutation site and spreader, and that we could end up trying to create vaccines for a moving target because the virus might be mutating 1-2 steps ahead of our ability to create the vaccines. 

It's why reducing spread is even more important than I'd originally thought. "Let all the young healthy people get it and be immune!" is a terrible strategy.

I was thinking more of the people like the Great Barrington Declaration.

IMHO the "well we're just all gonna have to get the disease" of course made sense if we'd never have an effective vaccine, but for reasons I've talked about at length here I think the death toll of this "focused protection" would be staggering, and that natural herd immunity is worst-case scenario.

But even then I hadn't really considered the mutation portion. I was considering the COVID we knew, and not really contemplating the fact that every virus host is a potential mutation site and spreader, and that we could end up trying to create vaccines for a moving target because the virus might be mutating 1-2 steps ahead of our ability to create the vaccines.

It's why reducing spread is even more important than I'd originally thought. "Let all the young healthy people get it and be immune!" is a terrible strategy.

And this is precisely why I have continued to maintain that I don't believe we'll create an effective vaccine.  But again, I certainly hope I'm wrong.