> Still better than covid, but damn
I mean maybe?
Technology advances, fortunately.
There is no going back to normal if everyone gets covid: it is a deadly disease that has killed close to five millions of people.
This sort of fatalism is not a really useful approach for reasoning about the risk, in my view.
People will forget, it's in our nature to push on and survive.
> Technology advances, fortunately.
If you have the current technology you will get Covid. It's not if, it's when. Eventually we will have good vaccines (in a decade or two?) and maybe people won't get it. By that point it will have mutated into being a cold for most people.
> This sort of fatalism is not a really useful approach for reasoning about the risk, in my view.
Covid is a serious thing and I'm sad for the people that died from it, before vaccines and the unvaccinated. If someone is carrying even a little extra weight I would plead with them to get the vaccine. Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.
Just to clarify that it's not the virus that will become more benign in an endemic situation - it's the hosts that will adapt to it, similar to how baby's/children's immune systems develop. At birth they are immunologically naive but then their immune systems are being primed by exposure to common pathogens like coronaviruses, influenza etc (which is why young children are ill all the time).
> Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.
I agree with your assessment but let's not forget that the IFR of Covid-19 scales exponentially with age. Which is another reason to get the vaccine.
It's a huge system that involves thousands of people.
edit: that's not what they were suggesting. I misunderstood!
He is repeating what experts have said, which is basically, because Covid is dormant in animals and domestic pets, and because you can spread it while vaccinated, essentially everyone will eventually get Covid. If you are vaccinated, your symptoms will be, on average, less severe.
Will babies be exposed to it enough, to eventually make vaccination a thing of the past? Do we vaccinate for other common colds right now (OC43)? Or maybe the opposite conclusion, that as you age you should be vaccinated against the common colds.
