It has been six months of posting about virus mutations

Almost six months. I started this blog so I could profit from the suffering of anonymous strangers by generating a little ad revenue, and then Google told me that I was just scraping news stories and unworth of ad revenue, and the algorithm was right. But now I have this crappy little record of how the variants have moved through society in the last six months and it is chilling to skim over these posts and see that process at work. I realize that in our social media environment fear is an income stream, but nobody reads this blog so let me say that THERE'S NOTHING TO STOP A MORE DANGEROUS VIRUS MUTATION from emerging, except for widescale vaccination. People have three choices:

• You can isolate, wear a mask, and hope you don't get the vaccine,
• you can get vaccinated and greatly reduce, but not eliminate the risk of infection and expose yourself to the statistically very small risk of side effects, or
• You can get vaccinated and wear a mask in high-risk situations, like Walmart

I really, really need to read some research about the ways in which people interpret statistical probabilities. I guess most of us, most of the time, don't live our lives by statistical probabilities, even the "smart" people. I mean, pure rationality excludes a great deal from our worldview, but in the case of epidemiology, it seems like the safest bet.