The COVID-19 pandemic

[danbrotherston]

Yes I am aware we have more effective ways of treating it now, but theres still no tried and truth method or medication to help handle covid at this point. I'm sure there will be clinical recommendations by the end of the year,

This really dramatically understates just how much better at treating Covid-19 the world has gotten since 6 months ago. Mortality is still to high for wide reopening, but the difference in survival rates is substantial. So to is the difference in the amount of damage done during treatment, the early focus on ventilators lead to a lot of permanent lung damage in formerly hospitalized survivors that we can now avoid.

but suggesting we'll have viable vaccines soon if at all is naive. 

IF we were to roll out a vaccine next spring that would be years faster than any prior vaccine rollout, with unknown implications, questions around lasting immunity and a whole range of different strains around the globe. Most people may simply choose not to get it and even if they do it would likely be not adequately tested and it would probably be largely ineffective. 

Normal timelines really don't apply right now. How long it normally takes to roll out a vaccine doesn't tell us anything about how long it takes during a global crisis. Normally one would not build factories or sign purchase agreements for a vaccine until it was fully approved, but right now we're doing just that for vaccines that are merely in early clinical trials. We'll probably spend tens of billions on dead ends, which normally wouldn't even remotely be a possibility, but right now seems like a small price to pay to shorten things by just a couple months.

There's valid questions around length of immunity, but they can be addressed with booster shots. Buying the world a couple years of immunity while we develop better second generation vaccines would still be a huge improvement over the current situation.

As for mutations, every virus mutates and has various strains, but the vast majority of them can still be vaccinated against with a single vaccine. There are some viruses, like influenza, that have been particularly tricky, but there's currently no evidence suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 is one of them (it lacks the features that let influenza mutate so readily).

I think that expecting the world to instantly revert to normal in early 2021 is certainly far too optimistic, but extreme pessimism that the vaccine efforts are pointless is also incorrect. We do effectively vaccinate against the vast majority of viruses successfully.

Indeed, this is a good point. I am of the optimistic position however, that given the incredible amount of testing and tracing around this virus, and the efforts behind immunizing against it, we may not need more than a year of immunity, this virus is new, and only within the human population, if we have a vaccine given broadly enough, we can extinguish it permanently, this is not without precedent.  Smallpox is the most well known one, but it occurs to me that SARS v1 and MERS also were extinguished.

Of course, the biggest threat to this is the delusional anti-vaxxers in the western world...sadly.

I'm also not suggesting things will go back to normal in 2021--I expect there to be long term lasting changes to our society--I hope there will be for that matter. But I do expect that the pandemic will effectively ended in most western countries by the end of 2021 (yes, I do realize that prioritzing western countries, vs. vulnerable people world wide is the wrong strategy to minimize loss of life, but I do suspect it will happen anyway). But even if the pandemic is ended, the recession won't be reversed immediately, and the damage to small businesses will last much longer, if it is ever repaired, but that's a different thread.