The End of the Pandemic: When will it happen?
If you are leaving the decision to me then I declare that the pandemic will end on 1 Feb. 2022. At that time it will become an endemic disease like the seasonal flu or common cold that we will just have to live with.
This would be a lot easier if everyone was vaccinated and hospitalization totals were less than a tenth of what they are (were).
Of course, if everyone got vaccinated and there were 1500 people hospitalized, the anti-vaxxers would whine about that, "Why bother to get vaccinated when thousands are in the hospital?!"
We spend too much time fretting about the unvaccinated. We need to get back to our lives. They will either develop natural immunity or Darwin will take care of them.
This "we need to get back to our lives" argument is the dumbest, least compelling 'argument' in the history of bad arguments.
We're never getting our lives back. Absent a means to totally eradicate Covid-19, the world has undergone a permanent change.
No amount of nostalgia will change this.
What we need is to continue to take appropriate steps to protect vulnerable people from a deadly disease. This will be an ongoing process, and how intrusive it is into our daily lives is dependent on how many needless deaths we are happy to tolerate (a number that is apparently very large for some, as long as they feel comfortable that it won't include them or their immediate families); And on how widely we adopt measures such as vaccination (which are fairly unintrusive but need almost universal uptake), rather than measures such as distancing, mask wearing, and quarantine, which are more intrusive but necessary where vaccination uptake is below the required level for herd immunity.
So if we decide it's "over" when we abandon masks, distancing, and quarantine, but don't see large numbers of needless fatalities, it will be over when we (almost) all get vaccinated on a regular schedule.
If we decide it's "over" because we stop giving much of a crap about a fair number of people dying each year, with occasional 'bad years' when loads of people die, then it will be over very soon, at the cost of our accepting that we are a bunch of cruel and evil cunts who are happy to kill a bunch of strangers as the price of avoiding a few annoying inconveniences in our daily lives.
In the past, humans have almost invariably accepted that cost; There's not much evidence that we have become significantly less cruel or evil, despite the development of technologies that could let us do so.
