If we fail to totally eradicate these strains of coronavirus from earth, like we have never ever in history managed, is lockdown forever right - the end of free life? Or was it just something required in 2020 for some reason?
Smallpox would like a word.
Polio, too, for the most part.
The last case of SARS-CoV-1 was in 2004 and the virus is considered eradicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
A year ago there wasn't much more than experimental capacity to make mRNA vaccines. Now we are at tens of millions of doses a month and scaling up.
When was the last last time we had a disease that spread this quickly and caused this many hospitalisations, on a global scale?
It's already well on its way, from what I can gather.
One frustrating aspect of the reporting for me is people talking about "more infectious" variants without describing whether or not they are more or less dangerous. In general, the virus putting more work into being infectious is good news; it generally comes at the cost of being less dangerous in other ways as it hyper-optimizes into replication rather than anything else. We should expect and want to hear about "more infectious" variants, which double as natural vaccines to some extent against other less infectious, more dangerous strains still using the same external protiens.
Say the current mortality rate is 2% and each infected person passes on the disease to one other after a week, then stops being infectious. If 100 people have the virus in week 0, after 10 weeks 1000 people will have had the virus and 20 will have died.
Increase the death rate by 70% and you’d have 34 deaths instead. Increase the transmission rate by 70%, and you’d have 170 people newly infected in week 1, then 289 in week 2, totalling 285,000 infected people, of which 2% die. That’s now 570 deaths.
Obviously the numbers can all be changed somewhat depending on treatment, or whether you expect everyone to be infected at some point anyway, but the takeaway is that more deadly is not necessarily worse than more infectious.
People have a hard time with this intuitively, because we probably live under the weakest selection pressure in the history of planet Earth, but it's vicious down there. Viruses are to a large extent playing a zero-sum game. If they get better at one thing, it almost has to come at the cost of something else, because they've already got all the knobs cranked up as high as they will go just to survive and they don't have a spare energy budget just lying around to put into other things without taking away from something else.
It's not impossible that some mutation was made that made it more infectious and more deadly... but it's a long enough shot that I'd consider the likelihood of incomplete early information and incentives that some parties have to amp up the danger in the presence of such uncertainty higher. Viruses do not routinely become more infectious and more deadly. If they did, we'd all be long dead. The evolution gradient tilts strongly away from that.
It's more likely to go the other way; some derpy mutation that reduces viral load, slows incubation, reduces symptoms, makes more super-spreaders.