Pure speculation, what's your view

[Summerofcontent]

We have 4 human coronaviruses which are responsible for causing a cold. (Ignoring SARS and MERS)

I wonder whether these viruses originally jumped from animals to humans and caused the sort of illness we're seeing with covid.
I also wonder whether without vaccines covid would become just like the other 4. Something children are exposed to repeated while at school and therefore enough immunity is acquired to make any repeat exposure a very mild illness.

Now when I say this I'm talking over a period of 100 or more years.

Like I say, pure speculation

Covid-19 will be in general circulation forever, just like the others. That has never been in question. Why do you think vaccines prevent that? Vaccines simply speed up the overall population exposure and give our body a sneak peek so we can recognise it and better fight it when we do catch the real thing, thus resulting (hopefully) in milder disease.

I read that a flu outbreak in the 1800s might not have actually been flu, but instead a coronavirus. Don't remember where I read it, and I think it was still just a recently developed theory that it might not have been flu.

Yeah I agree. I work in hospital and a lot of children test positive for other corona viruses (NOT COVID-19) without showing symptoms or just feeling a bit rough or having a runny nose. I think over time covid will just be around, children may catch it and by the time they reach adulthood they will be almost immune - as in they’d catch it, but not be poorly? I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see. I hope vaccinating adults speeds up our immunity or at least brings it down to the same seriousness as other corona viruses.

I wasn't suggesting vaccines would stop infection just speed up the process of transition from serious to mild disease.

So instead of waiting, maybe 100 years for that to happen it'd take 10.

Maybe vaccines won't be needed in the future

It's possible but SARS-COV2 has some features that set it apart from the endemic Corona viruses. Part of its pathogenicity is due to the strong affinity to the ACE2 receptor. ACE2 is widespread in the body and is involved in several important regulatory functions. Part of the reason that covid is less serious in children is that they have fewer ACE2 receptors. NL63 also binds to the ACE2 receptor but has much lower affinity which could explain the less serious disease progression.
The second possible difference is that SARS-COV2 is infectious before the onset of symptoms. We believe this wasn't the case for the first SARS virus and I believe there's no evidence that the others spread asymptomatically. With asymptomatic spread there is no evolutionary pressure for the virus to become milder.
Even with the current level of scientific interest in the virus, there's no way to predict how this pandemic will play out.