Depressingly, and thanks to the anti-vaxxers and vaccine hesitant, and the distribution of poor countries around the world, I don’t see how the general situation will get any better than it is now, Covid-wise.
I foresee the rest of my life (~25 yrs to go) prudently requiring, at minimum, masking requirements for indoor spaces and outdoor confined and crowded spaces, with boosters at varying intervals. These requirements could, from time to time and depending on the mutations percolating amongst the unvaxxed, become harsher and more stringent but, sadly, I don’t see the situation ever getting any better than it is now.
I think the majority of anti-vaxxers will begin to relent and quietly get vaccinated. Those who are vaxxed will continue to receive booster shots. It will just become a way of life - no different than those who have been diligent about getting the flu vaccine every year, but now on a grander scale. As for masks, they will slowly fall out of common use as people accept the new reality that there is a virus that isn’t going away but is not very likely to kill you.
COVID isn’t special in terms of viruses or disease. What’s making it different is that it’s effectively a new virus that NOBODY was immune to back in late 2019/early 2020. So at first, it was going to spread without any real hindrance through the population, as there was no immunity to it.
Eventually enough people will end up mostly immune one way or another (either via vaccination or catching COVID) that it won’t spread very fast or hardly at all anymore. Or the disease itself will mutate into something less lethal or less transmissible. It’ll happen at some point- that’s what happens in all pandemics. The Black Death eventually ended, and so have the various influenza pandemics over the past several centuries.
That was the pie-in-the-sky hope with the vaccines- that enough people would get vaccinated fast enough that we could sort of jump the line and not have a LOT of people catching it and a smaller, but significant number dying as a result. That didn’t come to pass, for reasons we’re all aware of.
What will end up happening is that once we hit a certain point of immunity in the population, the spread will be extremely low, and basically it’ll be treated much the same as say… the flu. People will get periodic vaccines against the variants that are in play, and the unvaccinated will just get sick and deal with it. Nobody will have to wear masks or social distance or any of that- there won’t be a need.
This will happen in rich and poor countries, with the main distinction being how the immunity is acquired- richer countries will have higher vaccination rates, and poorer ones will have higher rates of people catching it and surviving.
Ultimately it will be endemic- it already is. But what we’re seeing right now is the Delta variant ripping through the unvaccinated. This is unfortunate and largely preventable, but at some point fairly soon, enough of the “right” people will become immune (right in the sense of people who are very mobile and social and spread the disease effectively), and the spread will slow dramatically. Hopefully having had Delta will confer immunity in whole or part to other variants, and the spread will be very slow.
I suspect that as soon as the vaccine is approved for kids (5 and over), and periodic boosters become the norm, this will all become background noise. So 1 to 2 years? Five years from now we’ll be talking about how much we miss having the excuse to spend quality time at home.
Historically, it doesn’t seem like pandemics last more than 2-4 years. So using that as a yardstick, we might have anywhere from half a year to a couple more years. I’m not a doctor or medical professional, but my guess is that it’s probably on the lower end of that, depending on how effective the vaccines and acquired Delta immunity are at preventing the spread of future variants. And how effective vaccinating children ends up, once their vaccines are approved.
Regarding the kids, vaccinations for them will probably be a step-change. Regardless, it’s also going to be interesting to see how things go with the unvaxxed in terms of deaths and immunities.
Plague is still around but the level has decreased and treatment options have increased. This will subside. However, if we were smart it would alert us to the necessity of planning for the next pathogen.
Even if the pandemic follows the long end of the usual historical course I think it’s going to take far less than 2 more years before everyone who wants to be vaccinated is, and those who are vaccinated collectively say “if they [antivaxxers] don’t want to be vaccinated, f them, let them die if they want to so badly” and go back to things pretty much as before (except unfortunately for people who are both vaccinated and at high risk). If that point isn’t before the 4th of July I’ll be very surprised.
I envision that we will be masking for the foreseeable future, although perhaps with steadily dwindling compliance.
I’ve rather gotten accustomed to wearing a mask, so I imagine I’ll be masking up for the long term.
And I agree with @elfkin477 , once this gets under better control, fk the remaining voluntarily-vax-refuseniks. Let them just drop dead. ETA: And shun the until they do.
The cynical part of me thinks this is evidence that the CDC is already to that point given their new recommendations for the holidays
Their only recommendations are:
if you’re not vaccinated get vaccinated
kids should get a vaccine in November, if it’s approved by then
you probably should wear a mask indoors in public spaces
After telling people it’s okay to ditch masks if you’re vaccinated in May and watching everyone ditch masks, they have to know that the unvaccinated are going to follow none of their guidance without any attempts to restrict gathering sizes like last year, or restricting mass travel by the unvaccinated…
Those seem like absolutely the correct recommendations.
Unfortunately, I semi-expect that much of the mostly useless “sanitation theater” stuff is going to be with us for a long time. Like, I bet the plexiglass barriers in various places aren’t coming down, even though they are of questionable-to-negligible value. The airline safety spiel now includes “don’t cough on people and wash your hands”, so we’ll get to listen to that in addition to learning how to put a seatbelt on for the rest of our flying lives. The little floor stickers 6 feet apart I expect to persist for years, even though they aren’t actually very relevant for covid.
None of those things are a major burden of course, but it is continually frustrating how much we latched on to the dumb ineffective solutions and seem to be semi-ignoring the good ones (better air filtration and vaccine mandates).
I’ve already gone back to shaking people’s hands in appropriate situations.
Most of the folks I know who have plexiglass barriers between them and the public love them. They stop customers from touching them or trying to grab things out of their hands. I don’t think they will go away.
The floor markings are already going away here and the flimsy plastic barriers between restaurant booths have all fallen down.
I think that the damage that has been done by turning a disease into a political issue will take a lot longer to recover from. Now that we know that our neighbors and politicians are actively trying to kill us, all trust has been shattered and I feel that its to broken to be fixed.
Hmmm - I see a couple of things to argue with, there.
A mutation might lead to a less-contagious variant - but if the more-contagious variant is still out there, that’ll be the one that spreads.
Less lethal: Maybe - and if so, that’d be great (as long as that variant outcompetes the more lethal ones). COVID doesn’t kill you fast enough, so there’s no pressure for a less-lethal version to evolve. If you catch a disease and you’re dead in 48 hours, you have less chance to spread it, so there’s some evolutionary advantage to a virus that lays low for a bit while you’re still contagious.
I have to wonder whether things like the bubonic plague became less prevalent (in humans) in part because it had killed off too many humans, thus interrupting its own lifecycle.
Some people do actually stay home when they’re sick, so a less symptomatic variant would spread better (all else being equal) because people who aren’t noticeably sick will be out and about spreading it more. Assuming that symptoms are correlated with lethality (I think that’s a pretty safe assumption), there is evolutionary pressure in that direction.
But of course symptoms, lethality, and contagion are all correlated with viral load, so probably not enough pressure to overcome the selective pressure for quicker replication.
What are the latest data on these? My wife has a weakened immune system and, even though we’re both double vaxxed, appreciate that in restaurants, especially as full capacity is being reinstated where we are. Saying that, and notwithstanding the aerosol transmission, are the partitions just theatre at this point?
My understanding is that their value is pretty questionable. Yes, they might block some infected air traveling in a particular direction, but
(1) that air will go somewhere else, possibly just infecting someone else and
(2) the impedance of airflow may make general ventilation worse which will mean that infected air remains in the room longer, rather than being evacuated from the room.
So, I’m going with pretty much just theater at this point. It was a decent idea to try, but it hasn’t really panned out to general real-world usefulness.