Covid19 Is Here For Years to Come

[ClimbDad]

Today, Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of Sage, the government advisory body, said the world would be living with Covid-19 for "very many, many years to come".

"Things will not be done by Christmas. This infection is not going away, it's now a human endemic infection.

"Even, actually, if we have a vaccine or very good treatments, humanity will still be living with this virus for very many, many years.... decades to come."

Prof Sir John Bell, of the University of Oxford, said he thought it was unlikely that Covid-19 would ever be eliminated despite the positive news announced on Monday that trials by his university had triggered an immune response - an important step in developing a vaccine.

"The reality is that this pathogen is here forever, it isn't going anywhere," he told MPs.

"Look at how much trouble they've had in eliminating, for example, polio, that eradication programme has been going on for 15 years and they're still not there.

"So this is going to come and go, and we're going to get winters where we get a lot of this virus back in action.“

If these highly respected scientists are right, how will your life change? Do you believe we can go back to normal while the virus is circulating?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53488142

@Stellakent

We're already living with it and getting back to normal. The main difference is wearing a mask in some situations which most people are able to do. I'm going to pubs, restaurants, shops, I've been to the hairdressers and tomorrow I'm having a pedicure. Next week my gym opens so I'll be able to go swimming. I went to an art gallery earlier this week and at the weekend I'm going to a National Trust garden.

We have to adapt, socially distance and be mindful of good hygiene, but life goes on. Businesses and people are adapting OP, we can't all just stay indoors forever.

Whilst it is good people are doing more things like meals, haircuts etc., none of those things are happening at the volume they did -- I read only 17% of restaurants reopened? Many can't cover their margins with fewer customers so haven't bothered. Even if legally allowed to reopen with no SD, the market decides and some customers wouldn't return anyway.

I think the economic and social impacts are going to be considerable, because humans are humans and without strong drugs they just won't do things they don't need to do if there's greater risk than they are prepared to tolerate.

So work - sure, we need to. But if the NT will need to keep visitors low, to make it appealing to customers, how do they get back to normal income levels?

It's a puzzle. It's trickier the more your economic activity is built on discretionary spending - and the UK had a lot of that. It's also trickier the more of your nation's wealth is held by those at highest risk of the virus - and the UK economy has a lot of wealthy pensioners. My local theatre audience is vast majority pensioners. Will all return in the same numbers? If not, we've a problem.

OP has an agenda which fits well with people who don’t want things to open. This constant negativity is not good fir people’s mental health, the timing of these posts seems very deliberate.

@Pomegranatepompom

OP has an agenda which fits well with people who don’t want things to open. This constant negativity is not good fir people’s mental health, the timing of these posts seems very deliberate.

Agreed

Not sure why the OP isn't entitled to post as much as any other person.

Of course they can post. But if they’re laying it on thick every single time with the most negative interpretation of events possible, then naturally people will react against that.

There are many reasons to be hopeful and lots of encouraging scientific advancements. I’m not going to be dragged down by the OP’s insistence that we’re all doomed.

OP has an agenda which fits well with people who don’t want things to open. This constant negativity is not good fir people’s mental health, the timing of these posts seems very deliberate.

Nail. Head.

There are plenty of people on here with agendas.

One way of closing down debate on MN which is particularly evident with coronavirus is to tell people they aren't entitled to post.

People should not post garbage pseudoscience without facts and trustworthy links. that is not what this OP is doing.

Labyrinthloafer I agree, the social and economic effects are going to be enormous. I'm self employed and have no income as my sector won't even begin to recover until next year - luckily I did get some government help but am living in savings for now. None of the chain restaurants in my town centre have reopened yet, not even Costa. Many of the shops are still closed or have closed down. It's quite shocking to see how quickly the economic impact has taken effect, and it will get worse as furlough ends.

One way of closing down debate on MN which is particularly evident with coronavirus is to tell people they aren't entitled to post.

If you think anyone is breaking guidelines, do report them.

Other than that we can all post what we like.

That's fine laurie. So ignore. Or counter with logical factual arguments in a polite but robust fashion.

there are plenty of people on here who dismiss and demean anyone who is anxious and lay it on thick in the opposite direction.

If we close the OP down then you genuinely get your echo chamber.

A side point to those saying threads like this affect mental health. For some this may be true.

But it is also the case that some people feel better for facing up to fears and negative possibilities, and discussing them.

This is a new situation and people are just working through it. My view is I don't know very much yet - and neither does anyone else. I am happy enough to hear from all sides, both gloomy and jolly.

exactly laurie We are both saying the same thing! The OP can post. They are as entitled to as the next person. It wasn't me who told them to 'find another forum'.

@Pomegranatepompom

OP has an agenda which fits well with people who don’t want things to open. This constant negativity is not good fir people’s mental health, the timing of these posts seems very deliberate.

What agenda? I'm curious why anyone would want people to be pessimistic?

That's fine laurie. So ignore. Or counter with logical factual arguments in a polite but robust fashion.

Quit policing me. Report me if you have a problem with how I’m posting.

[quote BatSegundo]Right, I have been pretty cautious about this whole, partly because I have been shielding and partly because I have been appalled at our government's response and don't trust their ability to manage it into the autumn one bit.

However, there is some really encouraging evidence with regards to immunity that suggests a vaccine will certainly sort this out. Recent study in nature found that those that had SARS (COVID's nastier big sister) still have t cell immunity 17 years later. Not only that, but those t cells in people that had been exposed to SARS appeared to give them immunity to COVID. Excitingly, they also found evidence of cross reactive t cells (those that have the potential to give immunity) in the control group. These were people that had not had SARS or COVID and had not (to their knowledge) been in contact with anyone who had. So some of us might be immune without ever having COVID.

Explained here for anyone that's interested: [/quote]
I posted about this on a thread yesterday and I got an essay off the OP about how I was absolutely wrong!

It wasn't me who told them to 'find another forum'.

And it wasn’t me either.

This virus was never going to just disappear, I don't know why anyone would think that. As quoted in the OP, it is now an endemic human virus, entirely as expected. There are however lots of encouraging signs about naturally acquired immunities, post infection, as well as some proposed mechanisms about derived immunity from other coronaviruses. The data is also now starting to come in, because its starting to be long enough, about the usual human immune response to this virus, which is both broadly in line with expectations and condusive to vaccine development. I think we have to give it time for the vaccines to come through and learn the lessons for next time.

No, I know....

Anyway. moving on! This is why I do normally avoid these threads!

laurie I literally wasn't policing you. You pounced on my response to someone else. Hopefully if you read back you'll see that. I have no objection to anything you have written.

Read some books about what life was like for societies that had to live with highly transmissible disease.

I think you actually should do this, OP, and so should other people who are worrying about socialising never getting back to normal again.

Throughout the history of civilisation humans have had to live alongside dangerous infectious diseases. This has been the case for ALL societies for most humans who’ve ever lived. Not some humans sometimes, but most humans, most times. Sometimes in pandemics, more often in epidemic waves or endemic in the population with local breakouts. And these were sometimes diseases more transmissible than Covid (measles is like R10-20), more dangerous than Covid (smallpox had a mortality rate of around 30%), left you open to reinfection (ever-changing flu strains), hard to track because of asymptomatic transmission (polio). You would be horrified by what your 8x-great-grandparents had to live alongside.

We, here in our cosy first-world countries, won’t end up like that because of Covid. We have treatments, testing, better public health measures. We’ll get vaccinated once there’s a vaccine.

But if you want to plan out worst-case scenarios, okay: imagine none of this applies and we have to live with this as an endemic disease where we live. So your worst-case scenario is that we have to live a bit like those 8x-grandparents.

Did that mean that mass social events were over? Nobody gathered in crowds? Hugs were off the menu? Half the population felt too unsafe to leave their houses, ever?

No. No it didn’t. Even when they were living in far worse scenarios than us, facing far worse threats to life than us, that is not how people lived. Humans are social animals and when it comes to trade-offs between absolute safety and socialising, once a disease becomes endemic, we have picked socialising.

If it feels to you OP that it ‘hasn’t quite dawned on people what this means’ because they’re not drawing the same conclusion as you, that doesn’t mean you see more clearly than them.

The worry if this disease becomes endemic is what that means to poorer people in poorer countries. Starving people in Yemen are the ones who will suffer and the ones we should worry about.

Vaccine or reliable treatment (vaccine preferably even if annual like flu) then yes life will return to normal (I am asthmatic so desperate for something to happen re treatment/vaccine so I don't have that underlying sense of anxiety about catching it - although I have an inkling I may have had it back in March due to a cough and breathlessness which was may more severe and persistent than my asthma).

A side point to those saying threads like this affect mental health. For some this may be true

I think suicide is a very complex thing with many factors but we know rates have soared over lockdown. I don't want any conversation shut down - the science matters and we do need to discuss a future based on the virus sticking around. I still think you're on dangerous ground with someone like the op relentlessly posting about how life is never going to be the same again. It does harm. It can tip very frightened people over the edge. It's also extremely depressing for people who are in many ways less vulnerable but nonethless at the end of their rope after months of stress.

Honestly, stepping away from this particular virus, if you said to most people that in 5 years time a new virus would turn up that killed 0.5% of people and that we would shut down life and the ecomony for it and drastically restructure society and forbid most forms of culture because the virus spread in crowded spaces, most people would just go 'eh?' 0.5%?

Life involves death. You can't stand in a sea and hold back the tide. Lockdown in March was appropriate and too late. Hand washing and making short term changes over this winter is a proportionate response. But all this talk of decimating the best bits of our societies in the future is vastly disproportionate. Especially when the average age of the virus's victims is eighty.

These threads depress the hell out of me.

Perhaps ClimbDad could say what he wants. Clearly he is leading the “stay at home forever” brigade, but then he doesn’t rate the chances of ever finding a vaccine or anything to ameliorate the effects of the virus.

Frankly it sounds as if he is suggesting the only solution is mass suicide, as we will have nothing - no money, no opportunity to socialise or for the young to earn or meet people/a mate, no education (the Op is against ever reopening schools) just a “life” of existence waiting to be “got” by coronavirus. And we won’t even be able to sit in and watch Netflix as no new programmes can be made. We’ll be stuck inside our four walls watching The Wire for the 17th time until we die aged 120 never having done anything or been anywhere.

We’ll be stuck inside our four walls watching The Wire for the 17th time until we die aged 120 never having done anything or been anywhere.

But we’ll die much earlier than that, because we won’t be able to afford any medical treatment for any other conditions. So at least we won’t have 120 years of boredom. Phew!

I know it’s the exact opposite of what the op probably intended but anyone else actually finding this thread quite reassuring??

These threads depress the hell out of me.

Perhaps ClimbDad could say what he wants.

To depress the hell out of us, probably.

A bit more charitably: my theory on doomers like this is that their own psychological coping mechanism is to believe that everything will be awful forever, no glimmer of hope allowed, and that way they’re prepared for the worst and if anything improves on that then bonus. But the fact that most people don’t* think everything will be awful forever presents a challenge to that and therefore they are compelled to keep arguing with people about it, either to talk the non-doomers round, or use whatever the non-doomers say to reinforce their own narrative of “see, those idiot optimists just don’t get it, these naive cosseted fools don’t understand the bleak reality^ like I do.”

TBH I think you’re fairly naive and cosseted if you think the whole idea of an infectious disease like this is new to humanity. The number of people who die of TB and malaria every single year is absolutely horrific, but we don’t see it here because it’s mostly happening to poor people overseas.