⛰Quest for Immunity : Choose Your Own Adventure ⛰
🎲I sat down to make a post that attempted to illustrate how immunity is a spectrum and ended up with an “adventure game”! I want to help you understand how vaccinated individuals can still get infected but that their immunity will play a role in minimizing severity and reducing transmission.
👑You are the hero of your story. You will absolutely encounter the villain (virus) at one point or another – that is (nearly) inevitable. What you can do is choose your weapons and armor (primary series, boosters, monoclonal Abs, antivirals, etc). The game also includes the added immunity of a prior infection but it comes with a health penalty!
➡️Swipe through to see how different scenarios play out. 🗡🛡 The objective is to build up strength (immunity) in order to keep the villain health (viral load) from increasing above baseline.
❗️I want to make it very clear that I in no way want to trivialize COVID-19 by using this analogy. The pain and grief of infectious disease and illness is very real – not a game. I hope you can see that I recognize this and simultaneously want to give you another way to conceptualize infection, immunity, and the importance of vaccination.
‼️ I also want to make it clear that these numbers are entirely made up but reflect my current and oversimplified opinion regarding the protective level of each of these scenarios. You’ll see I include many “random die rolls” because nothing in health follows hard and set rules because of the many differences and confounding factors in a humans life. It’s also important to note that every exposure event begins with a varying amount of virus so the “villain health” is not always “100”. It could be 50 or 5000. Take this all with a serious grain of salt.
Feedback and discussion welcome!