One Reason to be Glad I Got Rejected

Quite a bit of news has surfaced recently about the mumps outbreak at our dear Harvard. In truth, the outbreak began back in February, but had not been publicized previously because precautions were being taken to isolate patients and prevent spread. With over forty confirmed cases up to this point, the university seems to have been unable to contain the outbreak, which means bad things for Harvard students.

Mumps has become a fairly rare problem in the United States because it is easily preventable with a vaccine. Now you're thinking 'okay, so those students weren't vaccinated, so what?'
The problem is, they were. All of the students currently affected were immunized, as per university regulation, and yet they contracted the virus anyway. So how is that even possible?

Since Harvard students come from all over the country (and the world), these students received their vaccines from many different locations, eliminating the possibility of a bad batch of vaccines. Thus, in my estimation, the only remaining possibility is that the strain of virus in this outbreak is resistant to the vaccine.

We interrupt this post to ask a very important question: why does the biohazard symbol look so darn cool? It's literally my favorite symbol in all the world of symbols. But I digress.

Now, before we all start jumping to conclusions, we should establish what the danger level is for this virus. I'm a bit of a disease junkie myself; I love movies like Contagion, I play games like Pandemic and Plague, Inc. and I have done multiple school projects on everything from cholera to the bubonic plague, so I'm personally fascinated by the logistics of this type of outbreak.

The virus is basically non-lethal, seeing as the symptoms consist of inflammation, fever, aches and pains and headache, and nearly all patients make a full recovery. So essentially life and limb are not at stake here, but it can make for a very unpleasant few weeks.

In order to minimize the number of students enduring those unpleasant few weeks, Harvard has admonished their students to take the outbreak seriously and to 'stop infecting each other.' The virus is transmitted through saliva, mucus and respiratory fluids/vapors (so it isn't exactly an airborne pathogen, but I wouldn't let anyone breathe on me if I were them), so as a word of warning to anyone who is actually at Harvard, do try to minimize contact with any of those fluids.

Returning to the title of the post. I'm not actually glad I got rejected, and I never will be, but I may have secured a unique benefit: I wasn't at Harvard for Admitted Students Weekend (refer to previous post). Cases began in February, meaning that anyone who has stepped onto the Harvard campus since February has been at some degree of risk. Theoretically anyone visiting the school on that weekend, including me if I had been accepted, could have been infected. And seeing as the virus is not currently contained and seems to ignore immunization, undocumented cases are roaming the campus at this very moment, infecting more unlucky souls. The threat is real.

So I suppose I get to count my blessings this time, since I'm currently at home, at precisely zero risk of mumps. But that could change, if the virus is indeed unaffected by vaccines (cue dramatic music)

In all seriousness, my sympathies go out to anyone unfortunate enough to be enduring the illness, and I hope those uninfected Harvard students will take measures to keep themselves healthy. I have full faith in the university's resources and ability to handle the outbreak, and I wish them the best, but frankly I'm glad it's one thing I don't have to worry about. So I guess I sort of won? Yeah, let's go with that.

Hic Manebimus Optime.