Educating people and encouraging them to wear masks 100%, but let's not start mandating anything new, or levying new fines that we have already seen be disproportionately used against over policed groups. Studies show that education and awareness works just as well as state intervention.
There's no scenario where eradication is realistic without involving government.
Before this year people would still go to work when sick, parents would still let their kids blow out the candles on a cake, everyone at the big event would kiss the same cheeks, etc.
Some societies in Asia have been doing that for quite sometime.
In theory, yes; in practice, I don't see this happening for some time (outside of a possible combined SARS-CoV-2 booster + flu combo). The mRNA vaccines are expensive to produce, and it's hard to justify a cost multiplier that's a magnitude higher & harder to produce. Flu vaccines are already multi-strain, and the current techniques already attempt to generate the recombinant strains that might be generated in the wild. Flu mutates faster than the current egg based vaccine production pipeline can handle, and the mRNA vaccine pipeline is orders of magnitude smaller in scale. This will change, of course.
And mRNA can keep up with flu. It can also target things in a more deliberate way, if I understand it. So a protein could be selected that is common to many variants and hard for the virus to do without.
And really: Emotional arguments like that help no one. Yes, people suffer badly because of Covid. They also suffer badly because of lockdowns. At that level of detail, there's no difference. What we need are numbers, something we can meaningfully compare. Like, how many years of life did we actually safe? How many did we destroy by not allowing people to actually live their lives? What's the impact on children's development, everyone's mental health, etc.? But apparently we have collectively decided not to weigh the effects of our decisions and protect the elderly at any cost.
Unless, of course, it would inconvenience them. You can't ask them to protect themselves, that would be discrimination.[1][2][3] Churches must be kept open, or grandma will be lonely. Hairdressers are very important for old people, so they're open.[4] Note that universities have been shut down for more than a year and schools have only partially reopened recently, as they're only important to irrelevant young people. And those are just the most obvious examples but.
Maybe my attitude would be different if I wasn't governed by openly antisocial elderly people.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[2] https://www.zeit.de/2020/17/corona-pandemie-risikogruppe-alt...
[3] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...
[4] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...
That doesn’t seem possible, unless you can get birds and pigs to mask up.
That would reduce the spread of infectious diseases even with schools open as normal.
Edit: furthering this idea, buses are not likely to keep the same protocols they have now.