On Covid

I do think it's time to start thinking about what the end of the pandemic looks like:

1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever. People will continue to get sick and die from it.

2. There will be more peaks on the infection and death charts. These are real people with real families. It will suck for them.

3. At some point one of the peaks will be the highest. 6 months or so after the highest peak is reached, the pandemic will be over. We'll only see this in hindsight. It may take a year to tell that the last peak was the highest. The disease won't be over, but it won't be the single most important thing in everyone's life. It will drop from the #1 or #2 cause of death down to #10 or #20, eventually. This may be different around the world. Countries that have had low numbers of infections and deaths may have huge spikes of infection and deaths.

4. There will be more variants, and they are not guaranteed to be milder, especially to individual infected people. There may be variants that affect children more. I personally don't think that is likely, but there are no guarantees.

5. Early in the pandemic, there was a lot of judgment on people who got sick. We'll have to let go of this. Speaking down to people doesn't help. Judging people doesn't help.

6. Some people will continue to wear masks for a long time. Some people won't feel comfortable in groups. Give them time. Don't force the issue. Give them space. I will probably wear a mask in crowded public places for a long time (grocery stores, airports, public transport).

7. We'll be learning about this disease for a long time. Hopefully government bodies learn how to plan and communicate better. Hopefully we step up our disease vector surveillance and tracking efforts

8. We won't get common understanding back unless people work for it. Dividing people with moralistic and righteousness-based messages is currently a winning strategy. I won't call this a "both sides" thing, I call it a "human nature" thing. I don't really understand why some people are standing on "their rights" - I guess it plays better than saying "I'm scared"

1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever because the population votes for it to be that way.

One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.

But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.