Originally Posted by
the_real_MSU_is_us
You know, when I think about this long term I really don't see a way out of this. covid will never be eradicated, it's like the flu in that regard. So every year when the conditions are right it'll crop back up. And -just like with the flu- it'll keep mutating and vaccines won't be 100% effective.
It also appears that recovering from Covid doesn't give you any immunity to it, let alone future strains, and we know from SARS studies that antibodies for that wore off in about 3 years so it's likely to be true for this too.
So what we have is a population that can't build up true immunities, vaccines that can't stay ahead of the mutations, a virus that can't be removed from the world, that takes 1-2 weeks before symptoms appear (compared to 1-3 days for the flu), and is extremely deadly.
I think in 20 years we'll regard this outbreak as a changing point in humanity, like 9/11, or the end of WW2 setting up the cold war. Covid will be regarded like cancer, or car crashes; a deadly thing that could take anyone and we just have to live with it. As we expect old people might get cancer we will expect old people to be hospitalized by covid. It's the new reality