Please, a show of hands...how many of you have never had the Flu? I surmise not a single hand is raised.

Influenza is a fact of life. It's a seasonal visitor (albeit unwelcome) with a certainty akin to the transit of planets. If you are alive, you will encounter Influenza personally.

So it is with the numerous varieties of Coronavirus. Eventually, you will be exposed to it, even acquire it and then (with a certainty approaching 99%) recover from it and move on.

Herd immunity is real, although many misunderstand what it means and how it is achieved. Simply defined, once a certain percentage of a given population have acquired and recovered from an infectious agent, the ability of that agent to further its spread diminishes dramatically, even exponentially.

Viruses require hosts. They are not living things and they cannot crawl about stalking victims with some sort of mischievous viral glee. An apt analogy would be to compare a virus to a seed; absent a fertile substrate, ain't nothin' gonna sprout.

Unlike a seed however, the virus loses viability over time, and once that tipping point of herd immunity is reached, the virus degrades for lack of viable hosts.

Viruses don't just lay down and give up though. They can mutate, adapting to new conditions as a means of survival. This is why we get new strains of seasonal illnesses. However, they cannot mutate into something other than what they are.

A Coronavirus doesn't become Ebola, or Influenza, it remains a Coronavirus, and despite having mutated into a different form, it still runs smack into the immunity that forced its mutation in the first place.

The new, mutated form may find ways around the earlier herd immunity, but rarely with the same or greater virulence than before. Almost always, it is far weaker and continues to weaken each time herd immunity is reached.

This isn't PhD level stuff, it's actually pretty basic biology, but since it appears a rather MASSIVE portion of the American public were either smoking behind the bleachers or skipped school on the day this was taught, many of us fail to call bullshit on the agenda-driven pronouncements of elected and appointed "leaders," when they issue mandates motivated by reasons other than solid science.

Our attempts to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus among those who are biologically equipped to deal with it (the young and the healthy) only serves to sustain the virus by delaying herd immunity, while also leaving the elderly and those with chronic illnesses vulnerable to a fully viable virus.

Remember this - the closer we get to herd immunity, the weaker the virus becomes. By postponing herd immunity, we aren't protecting the most vulnerable among us, we are endangering them needlessly.

The source of public frustration with government mandates stems from the growing realization that these mandates serve the interests of government, (and those pulling the strings) not the interests of the people they were elected to serve.

Halting school sports is a mistake. Whether high school or intercollegiate, these athletes have the least to fear from Covid 19.

Calling off school compounds the error by isolating the segment of population nature has specifically equipped to defeat the virus with ease, (youth) enabling us to reach herd immunity sooner, which we know weakens the virus to the point of relative safety for those with vulnerabilities.

We are being hectored, lectured, manipulated, deceived, and mandated into prolonging this pandemic. And it doesn't take a PhD in virology to figure out why.