Could it be possible that we just end up dealing with covid forever like we do with the flu, except orders of magnitudes more severe and deadly?

  • hahafuck [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Really highly contagious endemic diseases become victims of their own success and burn out, eventually, which doesn't mean disappearing but which will look different. Its a guess but I would say it will still take a few years but it won't ultimately be orders of magnitude worse than the regular flu, as even at its worst its not really. Maybe like, twice or four times as deadly as the flu year after year, with the majority of people having enough immunity to justify a lack of social measures beyond a small degree of isolating the sick. Masks aren't here to stay in the west, that's for damn sure

      • hahafuck [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yes exactly, a few million deaths of covid a year, highly weighted towards the third world, would be like 4-6 times the flu burden and well within tolerances. You would see life in the west essentially return to pre-pandemic standards. Especially since death is so heavily weighted towards the old, covid could easily kill a hundred thousand in America or Europe in a bad season and the rest largely not worry about it beyond regular worry about mortality we all have. Say hello to the new normal, same as the old normal

    • carbohydra [des/pair]
      ·
      3 years ago

      That would require a LOT of death, and it would be more devastating because of urbanization

      • hahafuck [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, probably a couple more years of rates like or slightly below these past two, right? Couple hundred million people should do the trick

        • carbohydra [des/pair]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I mean the Black Death killed like half of Europe, and while we have a lot of deaths now, I don't when we would reach "the virus literally ran out of bodies to spread through because it killed so many" levels

          • hahafuck [they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            The difference is covid is comparably very survivable (but grants less enduring immunity), the burning out is a product of immunity combined with death. Herd immunity was dismissed as a strategy because as a policy killing a massive number of people very quickly was not viable, but it is nonetheless going to eventually be the outcome in some form. However the fact that immunity from vaccines and infection fades seemingly pretty quickly means that point will be further out, and once reached will not mean the end of the disease but it will not look like it did in this, the period of fast burn. Hard to know where it will land then but I'm just throwing out a guess of maybe 2 million - 4 million people a year dead.

            This is well-trodden territory, but the Spanish flu is the best point of reference here, it burned through the world killing hundreds of millions of people, went through multiple stages, stuck around for a few years, burned out, and then remained skulking around killing a great deal of people but was done as a pandemic.

          • Owl [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            You don't need Black Death level deaths for that to happen. The Spanish Flu pandemic burned out rather quickly.

            I expect the end of covid will probably take more death the Spanish Flu, but probably closer to that than anything else. (We don't really know why the Spanish Flu ended so suddenly, but I'd expect being a flu played some role.)