"Covid will be here forever"

[Frozenintime]

On Sky news online. Sorry, I couldn't work out how to post the link.
AIBU to think WTF?!

Well yes it’s a virus we likely won’t totally eliminate it .

Sorry you’ve caught me on a bad day but these threads are fkin depressing now

Of course it will - they can't eradicate it. We will have to learn to live with it like we do with flu. Vaccinate the most vulnerable routinely and get on with our lives, knowing that it will kill people every year.

I wouldn't expect it to go completely. Just be controlled

Where did you think it was going to go?

I think we need to vaccinate the most vulunerable and get on with life.

Viruses should actually become less dangerous as they mutate because (because if someone is seriously ill they are not able to move around and spread the virus, thus the weaker mutations spread more and become dominant)

Yes they told us that in March

We will vaccinate and learn new medical was to deal with it.

Then hopefully it will become milder like a cold

Yep. All the more reason to learn to live with the virus, and end this hysterical farce of lockdown.

The Spanish Flu is still here from one hundred years ago, now more commonly known as the flu. It's kept mutating over time

Covid will be here forever and eventually ppl won't give it a second thought

One hundred years ago they didn't have social media to scare everybody with

Think if the plague. People still get it but when we think of the plague we think of the big pandemic rather than small outbreaks

*of

Yes of course it likely will be. We have eradicated only one disease ever. We are unlikely to manage it with one like this. Why are people always so shocked to hear this? It doesn’t mean we’ll be living like this forever, that’s a completely different thing.

Of course it will be. Its here now. Our 'normal' will be a new normal
Youngsters will develop some natural immunity hopefully. We will need to wait and see how long immunity lasts then it might be a yearly vaccine like the flu jab
Its going to be interesting to see how countries that have eradicated it manage. I don't think our way was necessarily right, terrible decisions have been made, but it is in the world and people move around
I can never understand why people are so unrealistic

Of course it's going to be here

Half the fucking country are going to refuse the vaccine

There are going to be times in winter when social distancing and working from home will happen.

Aye, we kind of always knew that...

@tttigress I made that exact point (in a more rambling manner) on another thread and got told I was stupid. It does however seem to be a consistent observation in epidemiology. But since we have suppressed the virus so substantially, it may well not be behaving in favourable ways.

@LadyTiredWinterBottom2

Of course it's going to be here

Half the fucking country are going to refuse the vaccine

There are going to be times in winter when social distancing and working from home will happen.

Half which fucking country? The UK is one of the most pro-vaccine countries in the world. Are you in France?

@LadyTiredWinterBottom2 If it helps, the take-up in the UK is actually estimated at over 70%, which is one of the highest take-up rates in the world. And it should rise once people gain confidence.

Diseases which incapacitate people completely very fast do tend to become weaker over time because that’s a better evolutionary strategy.

But this disease is already very good at spreading presymptomatically or among people with very mild early symptoms and only a minority of people become disastrously ill, so it isn’t experiencing much selective pressure to become milder. There’s no pressure on it to become more severe though.

@tttigress

I think we need to vaccinate the most vulunerable and get on with life.

Viruses should actually become less dangerous as they mutate because (because if someone is seriously ill they are not able to move around and spread the virus, thus the weaker mutations spread more and become dominant)

But this virus doesn’t need to do that because it is mostly passed on before people are sick or when they don’t feel that unwell. There is no selection pressure for it to get weaker.

Did you think it would be eradicated ?

Well yes, it probably will in various forms and within a few years we’ll be dealing with it by having a seasonal jab, alongside our ‘flu jabs which we’ll probably never eradicate either.
An average of 11,000 people in the UK die from ‘flu and it’s complications every winter so imagine Covid will eventually be roughly equivalent.

Many more died in the Spanish ‘flu pandemic of 1918/1919. The virus eventually burned itself out. It was too effective and killed its hosts, which is not what viruses need to do. It mutated and mutated until eventually it lost the ability to kill all but the very, very weakest and this was before we had vaccines against viruses. It would be extremely unusual if Covid didn’t eventually do the same.

Yes, Covid 19 will be with us forever. That’s how these things work.

BUT

Through a combination of highly effective vaccines which are now being rolled out at massive scale (400k people per day & rising fast), and people who have had the disease producing natural antibodies, we will achieve herd immunity and life will eventually get back to normal. That’s how these work. Worst case scenario : the virus mutates and scientists have to adjust the vaccines, and we all need boosters. Perfectly doable .

Ignore the doom-mongers.

Of course it’ll be here forever. Viruses don’t just disappear. We aren’t going to ‘beat it’. It’ll run its course over the next few years, like severe flu, and then simmer down somewhat. I guess the vaccine will be updated annually, like the flu jab.

You can't have a sensible conversation about it on here because someone always comes along shouting doom-mongers or that 'they are loving lockdown'
I'm very sensible and practical and find it wearing