share any ideas of what the endgame is now? Herd immunity? Endemic phase? Surely we can’t all just keep getting infected an infinitum
This is the endgame yes, and it's the endgame we've got to with other respiratory viruses that cause "colds", the other coronaviruses, RSV etc. We all get lots of colds each year, many of them with few or no symptoms but we'd "test positive" for them if we tested in the same way.
We're extremely fortunate that covid is very low risk for children, it's risks come with older immune systems that fail to deal with the new challenge, kids deal with it well - better than RSV for example.
I guess the big remaining question is how long it takes while there's excess vulnerability (ie more people who are particularly at risk from catching covid over being vulnerable enough through age and other conditions that any respiratory virus is high risk) Will a few repeated infections and the vaccines being enough to rapidly bring that state, or do we need to wait until the younger immune systems have aged into that state.