The Matka of the Covid Elite
The vaccinated and the previously infected are the new Covid elite. Wearing masks helps even more.
There is an interesting side-story to the football World Cup, which was held in France in 1998. When Puducherry (then Pondicherry) was finally handed over to India by the French in 1954, the citizens had the option to choose between French and Indian citizenship. Most of the privileged Pudducherians opted for Indian citizenship, while many of the under-privileged and low-income groups saw a way out and took up French citizenship, quite a few migrating to France as well. During the 1998 World Cup, these “under-privileged (originally from India)” immigrants played host to the “privileged (traveling from India)”and invited them into their homes for the duration of the World Cup - chances are in Puducherry these same privileged people would never even have dreamt of entering the homes of the under-privileged. The “elite” are defined as “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society”. The French Pudducherians thus became the new Elite for the Indian Pudducherians who had come to see the World Cup, upturning class and caste based rules.
I was reminded of this after reading the SIREN (SARS-CoV-2 Immunity and Reinfection Evaluation Study) study paper[1] that was published on 09 April in the Lancet, which said that depending on the definition of re-infection, between 84-90% of people, who had been previously infected, were protected from reinfection for at least 7 months (the duration of the study), irrespective of the type of SARS-CoV-2 strain. There is no mention of severity if re-infected, but from their study it appears that those who had re-infection had mild symptoms.
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