Ed note: The honest answer is — we really don’t know! Are we getting near the point that COVID will behave like the common cold as more are vaccinated? Are we rushing to openness or hunkering down with fear–or is there a common ground of behavior? Not knowing the answers is hard for us all. But one thing for sure–we only have so many years in front of us. Let’s not forget to enjoy life!
By Marc FisherSeptember 4, 2021 at 6:51 p.m. EDT3.3k
It’s basically over already. It will end this October. Or maybe it won’t be over till next spring, or late next year, or two or three years down the road.
From the most respected epidemiologists to public health experts who have navigated past disease panics, from polemicists to political partisans, there are no definitive answers to the central question in American life: As a Drudge Report headline put it recently, “is it ever going to end?”
With children returning to classrooms, in many cases for the first time in 18 months, and as the highly contagious delta variant and spotty vaccination uptake send case numbers and deaths shooting upward, many Americans wonder what exactly has to happen before life can return to something that looks and feels like 2019.
The answers come in a kaleidoscopic cavalcade of scenarios, some suggested with utmost humility, others with mathematical confidence: The pandemic will end because deaths finally drop to about the same level we’re accustomed to seeing from the flu each year. Or it will end when most kids are vaccinated. Or it will end because Americans are finally exhausted by all the restrictions on daily life. Coronavirus anxiety for families remains high as D.C. kids return to school.
Innumerable predictions over the course of the pandemic have come up lame. Some scientists have sworn off soothsaying. But as they learn more about the coronavirus that bestowed covid-19 on mankind, they build models and make projections and describe the hurdles that remain before people can pull off the masks and go about their lives.
it strikes me that, like the various flu varieties, notably “swine flu” we’ve sort of gotten used to annual flu shots which (we hope) greatly reduce the incidence of flu and, if, despite vaccination, infected, reduce the severity and mortality of flu. With the development of so far pretty effective mRNA vaccines which boost natural immunity to COVID19, and the prospect of further development (we’re still in the first blush of a reasonably effective vaccine), the problem of COVID19 may diminish to something like the problem with flu – some people will still contract it, and a number of fatalities will result, but the incidence of COVID19 infections, as well as the severity of the infections are almost surely going to diminish with increased (and, hopefully, routine) annual vaccinations. In time, hopefully, the anti-vaccination factions will accept the idea that vaccination is not a political issue and is, instead, a commonplace health issue, and life will more or less return to what it was prior to our current pandemic, just as it did in the early 1920s, following the “Spanish flu” pandemic which swept the world in 1918-1921. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the “return to normality” – it will take many more hospitalizations and deaths, primarily of those who are not immune or do not develop immunity through vaccination, to swing opinions to acceptance of what medical science tells us: it’s (vaccination) very effective and very safe. And it will probably be pretty cheap, synthesized using (eventually) routine CRISPR technoloty.