Quote Originally Posted by jackal2 View Post
No offence taken, queensland.

I was citing a particular study on eczema that appeared to back up Elite's theory that
people who are brought up or work in relatively harsh conditions develop a certain resilience level that those in more benign conditions might not,
but the answer won't be binary. As far as COVID-19 is concerned we pretty much know nobody is immune, even though some are asymptomatic, and if you live in lower socio-economic areas which can often be densely populated and possibly less sanitary, the risk of cross infection surely increases.

At an individual level our immune systems can be contradictory and difficult to fathom. For instance I'm allergic to animal fur and yet I barely get any reaction to mosquito bites, whereas my mother gets an extreme reaction to mozzies but has no reaction cats and dogs.
That, pretty much is what I'm trying to explain.....humans are an animal (though very clever and adaptive) and were created by evolution to exist in the rough-n-tumble world at large.....from the minute we are born, our immune system kicks into gear to keep us alive and the more it is exposed to, the better.....HOWEVER child mortality rates even 150 years ago were horrific, that's why the Victorians had large families.....we are all carrying around hundreds of "natural" diseases like TB, but we have adapted our environment to ensure that "consumption" (the body consumes itself leading to rapid weight loss) coupled with a simple BCG, means that in the West, TB had almost been eradicated.
It got to the point that different countries decided it was no longer cost-effective to immunise whole generations of school-kids (shots ranged from $1.15 for the UK buying 1 million per year to over $100 in the USA where it was specifically ordered for a single patient as they never had a policy of 100% immunisation)
Letting a child play in the garden and "scrumping" apples off a tree and eating it without spraying it with Dettol, is totally different from letting a kid run barefoot in open sewerage in a Mumbai slum (though if he survives that he may become a medical marvel)