A simple question?

[Catsrcool69]

Genuine question in the hope someone can reassure me. What could change in the future to mean that we no longer need restrictions and lockdown? It seems vaccines significantly reduce rates of serious illness and death, but are not enough by themselves to resume what we used to think if as normal life, at least not for the whole year . I'd love to be wrong! Just struggling to see what changes now.

When people brought the common cold to isolated places, it killed some of the population with no immunity.

With time, the virus became the same as it is for most of us - a nuisance for most but a few very rare more ill people/fatalities.

That’s what will happen to COVID I think. It will just become a regular virus which, for the vast majority of us, will be a minor pain in the butt. We will hopefully be able to keep up with its mutations and continue to protect more vulnerable with vaccines as we do with the flu.

It’s not in the virus’s interests to kill its hosts.

Fingers crossed it's starting to happen. The new strain seems less deadly which means, once that is properly established, we can stop asking people positive, but well to isolate.

As PP says, lots of things we live with now were deadly when first introduced to a new population.

@AtlasPine

It’s not in the virus’s interests to kill its hosts.

It has killed my relative last week

When enough people have enough herd immunity that mass hospitalisations are no longer a risk.

Or, when the virus mutates to become much milder and does not further mutate to become more severe again.

Or, when more effective vaccines are developed.

Or any combination of the above.

Vaccines most likely.
We've had a fairly good 2021 summer and autumn due to an early and succesful vaccine programme. Very few restrictions over summer at all really

When poorer countries have a higher vaccine rate.

All very well boosting ourselves to the nines but until the rest of the world is sufficiently vaccinated, variants will keep mutating.

True slaybell