[sjg007]

Yes most likely we will have a yearly vaccine or cocktail of vaccines for covid. Not sure if it will be mRNA specifically but most likely it will be.

The flu shot for example isn't an mRNA vaccine but rather the strain they think will be dominate.

Regardless, we will be wearing masks and social distancing for a long time (years) to come.

[ghaff]

Boosters are probably inevitable but once people are widely vaccinated, most are going to get on with their lives in a largely pre-pandemic way.

[ls612]

I feel like it is optimistic to think that we will be allowed to live our lives the pre pandemic way. These new strains will be trotted out as a good excuse to keep these restrictions around much longer.

[ghaff]

IMO no government in the US is going to indefinitely ban large indoor gatherings, indoor dining, bars, schools/universities as usual, physical conferences, etc. And any "rules" notwithstanding I fully expect that when summer rolls around and a lot of people, especially the more vulnerable, have been vaccinated whether it's imperfectly or not are going to back to beaches, bars, concerts, etc. At some point, it's just another disease of which there are many that sometimes kills people.

[sjg007]

All pandemics end eventually, but it depends right? It depends on hospital capacity and how infectious and lethal the variants are and if the vaccines work and how fast the spread is. Not to mention super spreader events.

Covid wild-type was/is bad enough to crush global hospital systems so that's really a big issue. It will take years to train more doctors and nurses to run covid wards if that's something we decide to do.

Also things won't go back to normal because our hyper-globalization and world wide travel has definitely increased the risk of pandemics. So we have to think of the next unknown one, use technology to prepare as well as implement risk reduction processes. Covid testing for international travel will probably never go away.

[koheripbal]

The moment we discovered that numerous other species are transmitting the illness - made yearly shot inevitable.

[sjg007]

We've know this is true for generations...