What would the plan be now if vaccine developments had failed?

[StealthPolarBear]

The vaccine development and rollout has been amazing. I am utterly imprrssed.
Last year there was a lot of doom and gloom (understandably) that there would never be a vaccine. If we'd got to this stage with no vaccine at all, what would the plan be? Just reopen over summer and plans for online school learning for the forseeable future? Lockdowns September to April?

Well no we couldn’t have locked down for 8 months every year that wouldn’t be a long term sustainable long term plan.

It’s an interesting question. The argument is that all pandemics run their course. So we would maybe have had a summer like last year (whilst hopefully the government would have pumped millions in to the health service. Not sure how you’d train and get staff though. Then another awful winter. Then would it have run its course and become another virus circulating? Many people would have died, many would have had it and built up some immunity..

They were never going to fail. I was astonished that people ever thought this. There was some concern about how long it would take but lots of factors contributed to convince me that we would have a least one and probably many more vaccines relatively quickly

• Slow mutating virus
• Previous work done on similar SAS viruses that were well developed and showed promise but shelved for lack of interest and funding a few years ago
• Unprecedented scientific sharing of data very quickly ( virus sequence public in Jan 2020)
• massive worldwide government- backed funding and support for development

I don’t know but I genuinely lose sleep over it

I guess we would all be dead.

@Donoteatthekittens

I guess we would all be dead.

100%

Worse than dead! I read on Twitter that death from covid only lasts 6 months or so, so we would all have died about three times.

more seriously - I think it would have circulated round the globe infecting people until there high enough immunity existed in populations for it to die down and become an endemic virus. Vaccines just sped that up with fewer deaths involved.

It is a good question - personally I’m thankful we don’t have to answer it for real.

I think @GoldenOmber is probably broadly right. Individuals would do what they could to avoid catching it (hands, face, space etc), but we couldn’t have lockdown for 2 or 3 years. Sooner or later, pretty much everyone would catch it and either get better or die. Mostly get better.

The economic and social impact would be utterly horrendous. But 100 years from now it would be another entry in the history books, like the 1918 pandemic or the world wars.

So a series of awful winters until the virus died down naturally? Although I have been told that no virus of this kind has ever done so!
Also I think it was whitty or van tam who said we may never have a vaccine. Clearly they were hopeful but it was bh no means a certainty.

I'm very glad we don't have to answer it! Vaccine development and in fact roll out have been modern day miracles.

We would have had to go for the herd immunity strategy & accept a higher death toll. A permanent or rolling lockdown is unsustainable and at best a temporary strategy.

I think there would be more focus on treatments and prevention as well as developing strategies for the running of a semi-normal society such as expanding NHS capacity which I suspect would utilise under qualified HCA’s.

Who cares? That's like pontificating on what we would do if tb, plague and cholera were all still rife. There would be far fewer people and people would die earlier, some of them out on the streets due to lack of hospital beds.

I have every faith in the scientists.

They developed a vaccine for a new virus with over 95% efficiency rates. I am optimistic they will be able to tackle the variants and produce booster jabs.

About 3 million people would have died. The govt job would be to manage that so that NHS and society didn't break down completely.

Marshall law, curfew, mass burials. It is actually all planned out in the flu pandemic preparedness plan.

What kept me awake at the beginning was if it started to kill children. I wouldn't like to even think about what that would have done to society and families. How did out forebears live through cholera/TB/typhoid pandemics in the 1800s? How did they stay sane and carry on?

They stayed sane because their expectations were so very different. Death in childhood was so commonplace as to be unremarkable and death generally was accepted as an unavoidable fact of life (and the gateway to a better place).

@Donoteatthekittens

I guess we would all be dead.

From a virus with a CFR of less than 1% for the majority? Hardly

Where do you get 1% from @bumbleymummy ? I’m seeing 2-3% quoted most recently.

It is actually all planned out in the flu pandemic preparedness plan

I think this is fascinating and I’ll hunt it out but not yet; it’s all too real right now and I need to read about it as an abstract concept not a real possibility

@StealthPolarBear So a series of awful winters until the virus died down naturally?

It’s not that it would die down so much as more and more people would acquire immunity through surviving it.

Reinfection is possible. It generally leads to milder symptoms, but also tops up your immunity. And remember that children overwhelmingly have mild symptoms.

So, over time, we would develop a situation whereby the virus was circulating and the vast majority of the population had enough immunity through repeated infection that it was a minor inconvenience to them, like a cold. The unfortunate few would still succumb. Children would get it multiple times in childhood with no serious issue in the vast majority of cases.

That’s without any improved treatments, which we will almost certainly have.

So, eventually, it would be a minor inconvenience. We wouldn’t shut down for it, or have to avoid meeting. But before we got there, there would be a massive number of deaths and quite possibly social disorder. Thank God we have got vaccines.

I thought ‘we’d all be dead’ was sarcastic.

Because we know what the CFR is and it isn’t 100%. Must have been a joke!

@Puppylucky

They stayed sane because their expectations were so very different. Death in childhood was so commonplace as to be unremarkable and death generally was accepted as an unavoidable fact of life (and the gateway to a better place).

Actually I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest they still grieved very deeply and many really didn't 'stay sane'. Many drank themselves to a slow death. But when you've been bereaved multiple times, it's like lots of bad things that still happen now. What choice do you have in terms of coping or falling apart? People likely had other children who needed them or a job to do to stay afloat. They had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Humans are innately extraordinarily resilient because as a species we have had to be.

Have a read of The Five - one of the Ripper's victims had lost multiple siblings as a child and then I think multiple children too. It had a huge impact on the surviving family.

As PP have said, what frightenes me to death is if there was a virus that had a high child mortality rate.
If that was the case, this world now would be like a dream world

@ACovidofWitches Yes I think you're right. I don't think there's ever been a period in history when people were not wracked by the loss of their children in particular. All the lost children in Shakespeare show what a recurring and constant underlying concern it was then.

@Cornettoninja A good decision. Even at the best of times it's a disturbing sett of issues to think about.

@ThePricklySheep ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid Look at the By Age charts.

@Delatron Maybe it was!

[quote bumbleymummy]@ThePricklySheep ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid Look at the By Age charts.

@Delatron Maybe it was![/quote]
@bumbleymummy
Oh for those without pre-existing conditions? I don’t think you can just ignore everyone with diabetes and high blood pressure?

“ Diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, hypertension, and cancer were all risk factors as well, as we see in the chart.

By comparison, the CFR was 0.9% – more than ten times lower – for those without a preexisting health condition.”