[Clodfobble]

A good article from a top epidemiologist about our realistic outlook.

Some choice quotes:

So the bottom-line message here is that this virus is going to keep transmitting to others until it hits that 60 or 70% level. And even then, it’s like a plane at 30,000 feet when the pilot announces we’re going to be dropping for landing. It doesn’t just suddenly land, it’ll just slow down... So it would not be unreasonable to say based on what I just shared with you with 100,000 deaths for 5% of the population infected, that somewhere between 800,000 and 1.6 million people could easily die from this over the course of the next 12 to 18 months if we don’t have a successful vaccine.

There are over 120 vaccine candidates being evaluated right now. But to go to the heart of your question, will any of them make it in the goal? We don’t know... You may not be able to develop what we call durable immunity that lasts a long time. That would be a real challenge, because then you’d have to keep re-vaccinating people if that would even work. The final piece is safety... There’s also an immune enhancement phenomena where your body goes out of whack in terms of immune response. And so, one of the things that we are having to look at very carefully is the safety of these vaccines... The idea that we’re going to have a readily available vaccine by the end of this year is just not realistic.

I think one of the things we have to understand is we can’t just lockdown. I look at this with two guardrails. On one side is a guardrail where we are locked down for 18 months to try to get us all to a vaccine without anyone having to get infected or die. We will destroy not just the economy but society as we know that if we try to do that. The other guardrail is to just let it go and see what happens. We will see the kinds of deaths we just talked about and we will see healthcare systems that will literally implode... And so we’ve got to thread the rope through the needle in the middle... Those are the kinds of discussions we need to have now. If we’re not going to lock up and we’re not going to open up willy-nilly, then what is the approach? And what we’ve been trying to do is facilitate those very discussions so that people can make hard choices. What are the things that we can do to change society that will help us maintain society to the best we know but at the same time also reduce transmission? That’s a key activity right now that public health needs to be playing a very important role in.