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?
who fucking knows? They'll just keep talking about new variants and new symptoms and record breaking infections forever, seems like. We already lost public space, the shared experience, and the world got a billion times meaner and we didn't even fucking address the problem. No future.
The Malthusians are in power so that's very possible. Their brains are pure capitalist realism, the only way they can conceive of dealing with climate change is exterminating people (but of course not the big consumers because that would be literal suicide). The pandemic gives a perfect opportunity for this, because all they have to do is nothing, plus they can profiteer from vaccines if they feel ambitious, which means the virus will keep mutating because the global south can't afford it. So if it ends it sort of has to end with the destruction of capitalism.
Covid is here to stay, but in a few human lifetimes we will have evolved to live with it.
Us, though? We’re going to be worried about it for the rest of our lives.
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
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
You would see life in the west essentially return to pre-pandemic standards.
Here in rural USA, this is already how it is.
That would require a LOT of death, and it would be more devastating because of urbanization
Yeah, probably a couple more years of rates like or slightly below these past two, right? Couple hundred million people should do the trick
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
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.
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.)
That takes generations for human evolution. So for us it is effectively forever.
In going with forever covid. Our masters will decide that is more profitable for them in the short run to normalise it than to fight it with costly lockdowns. In the imperial core people will keep getting vaccines that'll help mitigate the disease. In the global south? Well, I guess they should have just pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.
Here's how I know it's basically over: My company has decided a firm return to office despite all this talk of new variants
Capital don't give a fuck
My company just extended WFH for everyone until March.
I was already WFH before covid though, but now they want to give less pay raises if we don't work in the office next year.
the good news is that it will end this century, the bad news is so will humanity
It won't end unless governments force a critical mass of people to get vaccinated. As long as there are a significant number of anti-vaxxer holdouts and governments tolerate them, it will keep spreading and mutating on a permanent year-round basis.
Also ending vaccine apartheid preemptively back in fucking May would have helped and developing countries might have made significant progress already toward constructing their own vaccine manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, but alas as expected capitalism won out and now those regions are where new variants are mutating.
So again, no, this will not get better, things are going to keep getting worse for at least a decade.
It won’t end unless governments force a critical mass of people to get vaccinated.
Where is Stalin when we need him?
I'm in Taiwan and we literally don't have any cases of covid. We never had lockdowns, only stay at home suggestions for a few weeks.
Stay at home suggestions for a little bit to get the cases to drop + wear masks to prevent spread + actual contact tracing. See how China does it, that's how Taiwan does it. You scan a QR code when you enter a store so they know where you were and if a case shows up tracing back to the store they'll be able to message everyone that was at it or nearby to get themselves checked.
There's a video on youtube that a Japanese filmmaker who has employees in China made and he covers what he saw the local gov did to contain covid. And no, welding doors shut is literally not a thing.
It seems the only long term plan is to adjust the MRNA vaccine every couple of years/months.
It will end when we kill ourselves and everyone around us :matt-jokerfied:
