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To the editor: The appearance of virus variants is not some inevitable misfortune. It was quite foreseeable. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has said, the virus can only mutate if it replicates. (“California’s coronavirus strain looks increasingly dangerous: ‘The devil is already here.’”)
Our nation’s approach to the pandemic has been what I call the “thermostat policy.” If the rates of hospitalization and death are increasing, we lock down. If the rates are going then, we open up. This is the way a thermostat works, and its function is to keep things warm.
We don’t want to keep the virus warm. We don’t want the death rate to keep a happy medium. What we’ve done is provide the coronavirus ample opportunities to replicate, so now there are multiple new variants, some of which are more infectious and more deadly that previous ones.