I mean we went back to normal after Spanish Flu and Hong Kong flu didn't we? Spanish flu killed 50 million (edit). Hong Kong killed 1 - 4 million.
People will forget, it's in our nature to push on and survive.
> Technology advances, fortunately.
If you have the current technology you will get Covid. It's not if, it's when. Eventually we will have good vaccines (in a decade or two?) and maybe people won't get it. By that point it will have mutated into being a cold for most people.
> This sort of fatalism is not a really useful approach for reasoning about the risk, in my view.
Covid is a serious thing and I'm sad for the people that died from it, before vaccines and the unvaccinated. If someone is carrying even a little extra weight I would plead with them to get the vaccine. Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.
> By that point it will have mutated into being a cold for most people.
Just to clarify that it's not the virus that will become more benign in an endemic situation - it's the hosts that will adapt to it, similar to how baby's/children's immune systems develop. At birth they are immunologically naive but then their immune systems are being primed by exposure to common pathogens like coronaviruses, influenza etc (which is why young children are ill all the time).
> Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.
I agree with your assessment but let's not forget that the IFR of Covid-19 scales exponentially with age. Which is another reason to get the vaccine.
Yes; we now have a gigantic effort every single year to get out in front of the annual flu, identify the dominant strain via global viral surveillance, and produce and distribute and administer billions of vaccine doses in a few short months, each and every year.
It's a huge system that involves thousands of people.
Yea you have a point in our futile efforts to develop flu vaccines. If we ever have something that's actually deadly infect the world we're probably just screwed. The governments have used all the clout on Covid. Best just to get the vaccine and move on with life. Let's just be honest, we will probably die of Cancer or Heart Disease.
I'm convinced if Covid hit in the 50's we wouldn't have near the deaths. We're such a unhealthy society now. Best just to focus on health going forward.
People will forget, it's in our nature to push on and survive.
> Technology advances, fortunately.
If you have the current technology you will get Covid. It's not if, it's when. Eventually we will have good vaccines (in a decade or two?) and maybe people won't get it. By that point it will have mutated into being a cold for most people.
> This sort of fatalism is not a really useful approach for reasoning about the risk, in my view.
Covid is a serious thing and I'm sad for the people that died from it, before vaccines and the unvaccinated. If someone is carrying even a little extra weight I would plead with them to get the vaccine. Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.