A new way to defeat COVID-19
Using the virus against itself.
In early 2020, a tiny virus has changed our world in ways that we yet have to comprehend, we are stuck in a situation of uncertainty, with seemingly no-way-out, our best hopes are to buy time, and yet hope, a resolution would present itself in the future.
So far, there have been two approaches, neither of which works or even claim to do so:
- One: To ignore the pandemic, which causes huge mortalities and chaos, a social disaster.
- Two: Lock-downs & Social Distancing, simply to buy time, a tradeoff that dampens the shocking impact but increases the overall damage.
As an intelligent civilization on a planet engulfed with life, we may have been extremely lucky to not have encountered situations like this more often.
To survive, we need a strategy, a plan of action, to approach novel pandemics Like COVID-19, for now, and the future..
Disclaimer! ( an obvious one )
I’m a solutions architect and have been trained to look at problems (all sorts of them) in a more systematic way. It pulls me out of my shoes, 10,000 foot in the sky, like that you can look at us not as us, but simply as a specie that’s struggling to survive.
From up there, one can see that we are missing an alternative approach that could, perhaps, make the most sense to overcome a pandemic like this.
I’m not, however, an epidemiologist, or a subject matter expert in this field in any way or form! I simply could not find any evidence of using or considering this alternative approach or even its existence and wanted to share my thoughts, so forgive me for not knowing what I don’t know ( ie my ignorance ) if that’s the case!
So what’s this novel solution?
Make the virus do the work.
Simply put, it’s an Engineered Spread of the virus! 😱
As crazy as it may sound, from a statistical point of view, it could be the most efficient and effective way of controlling the spread of a pandemic.
The key-word here is “Engineered”, for better comprehension, you can, essentially, translate it to:
The engineered spread of Immunity in the society
We know that in most of the pandemics, surviving targets will become immune, and we know that, in most of the pandemics, there exist, categories and classes of low-risk targets, -those who are expected to survive an infection-, putting these two pieces of knowledge together, we can design a geographical pattern of immunity lines that would shorten/cut the chain spread of pandemics.
This is the basic concept and the implementation designs and strategies can be expanded for more robustness and complexity, but for the sake of clarity I’ll provide a couple of simplistic, hypothetical scenarios for this approach, although (again) a real-world scenario can be a combination of different approaches:
1. Climbing to Peak.
In a Viral pandemic, reaching the peak means getting to a place, where, because of the number of people with immunity, Virus gradually loses its efficiency to infect more people, getting to a point of diminishing return.
In this scenario, instead of waiting for the peak to reach, we move towards it actively.
Taking small, selected portions of the population -those with much better chances of surviving the virus- and volunteering and in a heavily controlled environment, exposing them to the virus (or a weakened version of it) and after the contingency period, releasing them back to the society, essentially making it harder and harder for the virus to survive or mutate by using its own power against itself.
This approach can be used to immunize the front-lines of the battle against the virus or high-risk areas.
2. Socio-geographical immunity segmentation.
The name sounds ridiculous! but it’s essentially creating isolated districts in the society during pandemic times and reinforcing the immunity especially on the borders where these segments meet, making it harder for the virus to traverse these lines. Neighborhood management tools and community involvement can be a huge asset to drive and manage the crisis in this approach.
This could be an effective approach to isolate infected areas while keeping areas without the spread of the virus in a more-or-less functional state. In that term, it may look like statewide lock-downs, but in a more engineered/controlled fashion that reduces the size of these segments to much smaller areas.
The stringified and immune borders of these segments will help the segments to converse with less risk of spreading the virus.
Thoughts?!
Again, I’m looking at this problem, like I would at a global network of infected computers! there are ways to get the situation under control in a faster and more efficient way with less over-all damage than letting the situation settle by itself in a more organic way. this may not, necessarily, work as well or at all when talking about humans and there may be more complicated aspects, like morals and values to consider. but to survive and to thrive as a species, sooner or later, we are going to have to fight these threats in a more effective way! so let’s talk about it!
Stay safe and be thoughtful!
- mim
