Everyone has the same wish regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, that it should be gone. As soon as it started, everyone speculated on how it should or could be brought low and banished. More recently, Fauci and others have started speculating one way or another, if it will be brought to a halt by a decisive knockout via vaccine, or no, it will not be halted at all as it continues to eat away at the world like a cancer. I offer a prediction, a third way: that the Covid-19 pandemic will gradually decline in incidence and virility until it almost but never fully ever leaves the public consciousness. It will settle into a permanent whimper.
The basis for this prophecy is not voodoo but rather, observation and probability. Even without a vaccine, we are watching the death rate plummet even as testing and cases rise. By the end of 2020, we could be looking at a real death rate approaching that of the flu, a downward trajectory, if taking into account probably untested infections. With a vaccine, that decline in deaths (and hopefully debilitations) will decrease even quicker, but do not expect a vaccine to eradicate the disease any more than colds or flus have been eradicated. It will be mitigated, never defeated; which brings up the next interesting set of predictions:
So what occurs when the all of the dreaded metric just keep going down and down but never disappear, as a death occurs here and there, and elected officials all the way down to the school board keep acting out of an ‘abundance of caution’? What happens when certain parties see ongoing political benefit to sickness and mortality that is no greater than the high season of the flu? What if certain parties benefit from chronic economic failure and underperformance? When there is always an anecdotal (or apocryphal) story about someone still on a ventilator, someone’s coworker died, and major media go to ‘unprecedented’ [oh how they love that word] lengths to keep wild headlines spun up? Meet 2021 and moving forward.