Monkey around

Covid-19 is governed by chance. The cellular mechanisms (organelles) that copy Covid make mistakes all the time. Some of these mistakes happen to be a more virulent virus which becomes dominant.

One monkey at a typewriter would take millions of years to write a Shakespeare play. A million monkeys sitting at typewriters will deliver it tomorrow. Covid variants are Darwinian evolution working in real time.

Millions of people have Covid. If those people wear open weave cloth masks chance will allow only the virus variants which spread in fine droplets to propagate

If millions of people gather inside buildings, each two metres apart, only the variants which can hang in still air for hours will propagate. If a vaccine targets one particular form of protein spike, then variants of a different form, yet still effective, will propagate.

To get out of this situation we need to drastically reduce the number of monkeys, that is the number of infective persons and hence the number of random copies of the virus.

We must not abandon restrictions; rather, we need to cut the main routes of virus transmission by only meeting in very well-ventilated indoor space, wearing effective masks not pretty pieces of cloth and constantly updating the vaccines.

Possibly the most effective move would be to let the population know which circumstances are to be avoided and make sure they are avoided. For example, the transmission of ebola was stopped in Sierra Leone by ending the practice of washing the dead.

Allowingpeopletodoasthey want will turn the present epidemic into a catastrophe. Don’t let bemused politicians avoid responsibility and wash their hands – that didn’t work before and it won’t work now.

KEN CAREW Dumfries, Dumfriesshire