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I think it should last between 18 to 24 months too, but the confinement measures will be lifted much sooner. Once the epidemic curve is going down and its well under control, people will be allowed to go back to work with face masks, slowly industry by industry before the end of the year. This should only take a couple of months.

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There's no reason to expect "Once the epidemic curve is going down and its well under control"

before there's a vaccine deployed or everyone has been infected and paid the personal cost of their viral lottery ticket.

Best bet might be a modifier herd immunity plan, of infecting healthy people with a miniscule viral load and hoping the immune system can handle it better than a heavy load from getting sneezed on or spending all day at a hospital.

That's just modified variolation with a flu virus. We don't use that method anymore for many good reasons. Controlling a viral infection is nearly impossible, let alone literally billions of people, all at once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation

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