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Very honest and good faith question. Until when? What are the specific metrics for when we don't need masks or non-tweaked vaccines tailored to yearly variants like normal flu shots? At some point we need to say "if you are immunocompromised you need to take special precautions like you always did before covid". Just wondering out loud when that should be because for some of us it's sooner rather than later.

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Where I live, precautions are specifically targeting hospital capacity. So I would expect that once hospitals are no longer under threat of being overwhelmed, requirements will be removed.

Reasonable question. I don't think we can answer that until most of the population has been vaccinated and we see how "quiet" the disease becomes. I think we are likely to be getting annual vaccinations for years to come. Don't forget that over 200,000 people in the US below age 70 have died. Most of those would not have been considered immunocompromised prior to COVID.

That's actually a good point because the "until most of the population has been vaccinated" is tricky. We don't really know how effective the vaccines are against new variants. Probably better than nothing I'd guess but it also doesn't completely stop transmission. An overly optimistic timeline is 100 days to get a tweaked vaccine for a new variant but we saw that's about how long it took for Delta to move completely through Florida. That plus the possibility of animal reservoirs and many high-compliance mask and lockdown areas getting large spikes anyway leaves me skeptical we can necessarily solve this through the public health policies that have been tried. I just want answers like everyone else and am trying to just learn to be healthy and live with this virus for the rest of my life. Happy to get an annual shot like the flu when/if this becomes endemic and seasonal.

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