Like mid summer.

The downside of this (the reason I say this is partly pessimism) is that if we do get out of this without another big surge, then a narrative starts to set in that the most reckless governors (Abbott and DeSantis) were "right all along"; we will have learned nothing, and it's even harder to take an informed approach to the next national crisis.


But the reason I don't expect this to take much longer: these vaccines work! They work really damn well. The variants are really dangerous (this is a great case-study in natural selection, BTW, if OKP ever wants to restart flamewars about evolution), but all of these vaccines work really damn well at slowing the spread, even of these variants, and they almost completely shut down the serious health risks.

So if most of the population gets vaccinated, especially the people who are most at risk (and so far progress on this has been really good), then, worst-case scenario: we don't stop the spread, but we almost completely shut down the serious cases and deaths. In other words, we finally turn it into "just another cold virus."

What if the virus keeps mutating? It will, especially if we don't get the case numbers down. But there's no reason to think that our immunity (through vaccination, infection, or both) will stop protecting us from serious cases and deaths. Just like cold viruses regularly mutate but rarely become dangerous, the same will likely be true of covid variants.

It's looking a lot like SARS-CoV-2 has been dangerous not because it's a fundamentally more damaging kind of respiratory virus, but actually just because it was so new that our immune systems didn't know how to handle it, so it could cause more unpredictable and systemic effects in the body.

Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe dangerous variants will come along every year. But this is where the miracle of mRNA vaccine technology comes in. I don't think people understand what a huge scientific breakthrough this was. There may be other OKPs with more knowledge about this than myself (certainly in the old days there were), but my understanding is that this technology lets us tailor a vaccine to any persistent strain of virus from nothing more than that virus's genome. Pfizer has already said that if a booster is needed to treat the current variants, they'd have it ready to ship in about six weeks.

So, in the very scary event that dangerous variants keep coming, AND they're able to evade current vaccines, we keep getting ready-made boosters for a few years and we're done. We can update the vaccines faster than evolution can update the virus!


This might be the only post I've ever made on OKP where I've been more optimistic than most everyone else. But this is a battle that science can win, and it already is winning, even if people keep fucking things up along the way.