2 ways out- a vaccine or herd immunity. Once it broke containment, those are options we had, and have.
They both suck, but stopping it isn't going to happen. I've been of that belief since late February....
Of course youre not going to stop it without a vaccine or immunity. However the spread could have been considerably slowed down if action had been taken earlier.
Probably, yes, and I'm sure we all wish a lot of things had gone differently across a range of countries and agencies, but that still puts us in the catch-22 we are now in. 18 months or more to a vaccine and little to no herd immunity, maybe 10% of the population, and we need to get to 60ish to stop it.
Thats assuming herd immunity works. From what I hear its closer to the cold than the flu. Its going to be a fucking disaster if it mutates and comes back in the fall.
Yes, true. It probably does come back in the fall, assuming it recedes at in the summer, which is also not a certainty. Hopefully we'll have better infrastructure in place at that point to test, track and trace cases to prevent it going haywire and overwhelming the medical system, but this thing is going to be a PITA for quite a while, maybe a year or two, assuming we can get it under control at all with a vaccine or drug treatment.
If not, the only thing that can change it is acquired immunity, which means we may see a couple of rounds of this before people's immune systems learn to fight it off effectively.
This may also be why we are seeing reports of people testing positive more than once. We're all like babies, our bodies seeing this pathogen for the very first time, so our bodies, in some cases, may need multiple exposures to learn how to fight it more effectively.
Definitely a damn shit-show.