Is the only way out a vaccine?

[Borkins]

Or will it just go away?
On the plus side, the environment is happy.

Vaccine won't make it disappear I don't think. It's more likely to be seasonal like the regular flu is and come back (not as severely) each year from what the medics are predicting

Well, influenza hasn't just gone away, nor any of the other viruses we vaccinate against. So I would think it unlikely that it'll just disappear.

We need a vaccine.

Well, eventually it would go away, once enough people have survived and developed immunity. But that is not ideal.
Vaccine is at least a year away, I think, although one is in trials now. More effective at this stage would be a treatment- some promising results from early trials so far.

(and I am not a scientist- at the moment they don't actually know how long immunity lasts)

Or catch it & build some immunity. But that takes time and ia high risk for the older ones.

SARS, the most similar coronavirus, went away and never came back despite no vaccine.

But it requires aggressive identification and isolation of all cases to make it die out

China and Sout Korea have done it but for some reason western countries think they know better and would rather shut down their entire economies for months on end hoping for a vaccine to save them, rather than just doing widespread testing and isolation

Depends on the virus, the spread, lots of things.

I can see three ways out

1. a vaccine - this will take a long time though.

2. large scale testing to show who’s had it and is now “immune” - if we can get this up and running, we could at least allow those who’ve had it it go out and about.

3. herd immunity - once enough people have had it, it won’t have enough people left to infect and thrive on and will go away

BUT if it mutates, none of this applies. Although having had/been vaccinated against the old version should give some protection against the new version(s).

Problem is some things are less likely to produce immunity. Chicken pox vaccine isn't very effective and you can get it twice.

Depends if it can mutate the way flu does. If not it would be theoretically possible to eradicate with intensive worldwide vaccination (as with small pox). Though very unlikely.

If it does mutate then it will be a recurring problem, but people
will build up a level of immunity, so future outbreaks won't be as serious.

Either way we either need a vaccine for the current strain, or will have to accept massive numbers of casualties.

It depends what you mean by "the only way out" - even bubonic plague eventually stopped being a major recurring issue (after it killed a third of the population).
A vaccine is the only way to make it very likely that a given individual won't catch the virus, so if you don't get one then all high risk people remain at high risk if they catch it. Herd immunity and restricting outbreaks minimises the chance of them coming into contact with it, but doesn't make them safer if they do - as with flu normally.