How long are you expecting this to go on for?

[DennisReynoldsDuster]

Just curious. Friends seem to think it will all be fine again by May, I kind of feel like we will be lucky if we are “back to normal” by Christmas.

And by “this” I mean businesses shut and social distancing etc

I can see us still social distancing at Christmas, so very lonely Christmas’s for many many people

2 weeks, trying to be positive, if I think it'll be longer term than that I'd breakdown now. And have to keep going, so will plan two weeks at a time

I also think long term tension creates a war.

I think it will be next June this goes on for. Then things will still take another 18mths to settle.

I just put all the summer school dresses away for my little one. Sad times but realise just a small drop in the ocean. Nothing will be the same.

If they can get the antibody test up and running which could be in the not too distant future, people will know if they have had it. That way slowly people will be able to do more things? The worry is people may try and catch it to be immune

I also think long term tension creates a war.

Again, stop with the scaremongering - you sound ridiculous.

I'd think mid summer, I think having wide usage of immunity testing available will help thus, i.e. if you are have had it and have the antibodies. I suspect people in vunerable groups maybe effected longer. Remember they are only trying to flatten the curve not wipe it out until it's gone we'd be in lock down for a year or so.
Their calculations estimate how many people are infected now and what percentage of them will need hospital while slowing spread. Deal with the first big wave and rude that out a few weeks when the ones who have been infected last few days and next few days will follow... Etc. Until the hump is got over on the curve. Ok I'm muttering to myself sorry hope it made some sense!

I think 3 months until they expand hospital capacity. With the lockdown, deaths will rise for 3-4 weeks and then start to fall rapidly. After 2 months there will be few new cases and after 3 months few new deaths we can go back to work but with quarantine for international travel unless you have an antibody test.

There is a point where the knock-on impact is worse than the virus.

The government adviser stuff is based on forecast modelling. It only needs to be slightly out to make massive differences in numbers. It could well be totally wrong.

But even if they can’t make a vaccine, it’s possible to dramatically expand ventilator production to cope with the outbreak. Germany has much more ICU capacity than here and is seeing minimal deaths.

6 months

Put it this way, I'm not expecting my DD to go to university as planned in September. I hope by then we'll see the way out of this, but I don't think things will even start to get back to normal until 2021

It partly depends on how many people are complying now. I would guess not as many as the government estimated would. So that will make the first peak higher but shorter.
There's too many variables to able to predict overall though.

@EustaciaPieface what would the students who couldn’t start in September do for a year? And then in September 2021 there wouldn’t be enough uni places for twice the numbers wanting to start?
Most universities would massively struggle without a years worth of fees/income but couldn’t close easily due to the existing students. There are so many issues.

One year. At least. I don’t think the children will be back at school in 2020

Yes the vulnerable workers and children will still be vulnerable in September and more so in the winter. My asthma is much worse then.

There are so many issues.

Yes but nhs is priority. You have to change mindset to blitz style thinking. This is wartime Britain, it's just it's against a virus and doesn't respect borders.

I imagine all our children will skip and repeat a year. It might even out over time.

God some of the mad comments on here.

“ never” “ ten to fifteen years” there will be a war” . Total batshit. Eh we have a little thing called science,,....

The odds are by summer we will have a treatment for it. That will indeed be a game changer and life can go back to normal somewhat. Then obviously a vaccine should be ready by the end of the year early next year , to prevent us getting it in the first place.

Really can’t get why people predict how long it will last like we will never be able to treat it or vaccinate against it,,,

I think some people take a perverse pleasure in this.

18 months! War! Life will never be the same!

All based on conjecture.

*Aberdeen Uni workers already helping in hospitals to provide extra staff for portering, testing etc.

BTW it’s not just university workers who will be asked to do this, it will be many workers from large organisations.*

It's only in the last few days that it has hit me how much the NHS workforce and smooth operation of the organisation will be impacted with respect to non clinical staff.
We have a woman of 80 among our appointment clerks plus a couple in their 70s! Many of the porters and cleaners are older, I know one of our porters is 70 as he was debating when he'd have to stop coming to work, and our department cleaner must be near that age. The man that delivers our supplies - (boxes and boxes of disinfectant wipes, hand gel and masks etc these days) looks pretty ancient.

People, including me, a nurse, tend to focus their thoughts on the clinical staff, and the short staffed wards, but the NHS can't function without all the support staff.

So I'm sure there will be lots of volunteering opportunities. Perhaps a spell working in the NHS is the way to go for teens missing school. There will be lots they can do.

I think that by Christmas life will be returning, it won’t ever be as we knew it before but will settle in to our new normal.

By that I mean it will be better in some ways as we have had all had to look at life from another angle and see what is important. I think there will be more emphasis on people around us and relationships and less on materials possessions etc...

I would say July at the earliest

I'm expecting 12-18 month's in some form or another. Medical and Social Restrictions lifted first then slowly trying to open up the economy again. Many people will still be feeling the effects next year, and that me being optimistic. I suspect there will be cluster cases blooming intermittently. It takes quite a bit of time to develop, test, release and distribute a vaccine.

They said WW1 and WW2 would be over by Christmas too. I think it will be a quite gradual return to a new norm.

I want to try to unpick the psychology of the Coronaysayers who seem to be competing over how depressed they can make people feel. OP asked how long businesses shut and social distancing would go on. Then mid thread sone start saying "18 months at least", others do that "post a month then gap then 2021" thing which is childish. It seems to me that these people are seeking validation and seek it by posting the most extreme answer possible to an unanswerable question. There is an underlying fear of appearing naïve in many people which drives them towards this kind of extreme, knowing, conspiratorial thinking. The implication is (for example the person who posted the economic consequences would last 10 to 15 years) that the longer your time frame the more knowing and less naïve you are. Let's take the 10 to 15 years claim. 15 years ago smartphones were not widely available and broadband was in its infancy. The London bombings hadn't yet happened and the Olympics hadn't been announced as being in that city let alone taken place. Many teenagers of today did not exist, nobody much had heard of Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were primarily media figures. To take one single event from that time and say you (& only you) can say how long the after effects of that event will last presuppose that you know in detail all the other competing future events which will also have consequences of their own.I also wholeheartedly agree with the poster who pointed out that many are taking pleasure in the situation. They read the earlier comments and want to get one over the other posters. They may lack a sense of excitement in their own lives and seek to get this excitement through apocalyptic pronouncements. They probably refresh their news feed several times a day and get a thrill they will never openly admit to when they read another hyperbolic headline about 250,000 deaths or see the words "Breaking News". They are wrong and they need calling out.

I also think some people are enjoying th drama of this.

The media isn’t helping either. Much of the scare mongering on time lines is published assuming no treatment is available, and only waiting for a vaccine, when it’s very clearly a fact that treatment to cure it is being trialed now and could be available in weeks.

I was watching the medical bloke on the bbc news last night, he is the epitome of negativity. He presented a graph saying this would go on for a year to eighteen months, with regular peaks as restrictions are tightened and then relaxed.

To take us through the very latest time line a vaccine would be available, not the one scientists are predicting, oh no, the latest worst case timeline he could realistically state. But he didn’t tell anyone that was worst case.

Nor did he take into account that anti viral treatments are being tested now that could cure it. It was like to him that science just was not happening. He didn’t even present the two book ends,, ie this is what will happen if we can treat and cure it by the summer, which is likely, and this is what will happen if we can’t and a vaccine isn’t a year as scientists are saying, but much longer.

He just went straight into worst case and presented it like the only scenario, and factually it’s not the only scenario. We may be able to treat this in the coming weeks and cure it.

The media have a lot of blame on their shoulders, and getting twats to do predictions which are totally ignorant of any advances in science and what’s occurring is simply irresponsible. I really would have thought better of the bbc.

And this must be why some folks are so focused on the vaccine as the only way to solve this and totally and utterly ignorant of the fact that human trials are currently under way of drugs that might cure it and could be available in weeks.

Ordree and Bluntness thank you for your concern for the wellbeing of others, for your sense and reason.

You are right, some people have been waiting for this forever and are now revelling in it.