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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Depends what you mean by "this" - do you really believe we won't be allowed to leave our homes for anything non-essential for over a year?

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I'm just curious. Where do you live that you are not allowed to leave your home? I know different places are implementing social distancing differently.

UK - we're only permitted to go out if it's essential[0], such as buying food or collecting medicine. You're also permitted to travel to work, only if you have a job you can't do from home, and you work at one of the designated "essential" businesses/organisations. You're also allowed out for excercise.

The police here have in some cases been acting with ludicrous heavy-handedness, such as posting drone footage of 1-2 people walking over an empty moor, claiming they shouldn't because it's "NOT ESSENTIAL!". The actual laws actually seem quite reasonable, and leave room for common sense - hopefully the police will stop this nonsense, or their behaviour may cause people to lose respect and start flaunting the rules.

I believe it's the same situation across most/all of Europe now.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus

The actual law is a little bit more permissive. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/contents/made

This difference between the law and the government guidance seems to be causing a few teething troubles as police adjust to it.

Hah, I actually just updated my comment to make that kind of thing clearer, and see someone has already pointed it out ;)

I don't think it can be comoletely ruled out. However I do believe that's a maximun as the vaccine will be well tested and released in under a year.

You can safely rule out a one year lockdown because people will not tolerate it. They will violate the lockdown and the virus will spread.

Where are you seeing that? Every projection of which I'm aware has been in the range of 12-18 months. It's reasonable to hope for faster, but not to plan on that basis.

I'm just a layman, but my understanding of vaccine development is that the timeline has little to do with how long it takes to actually research, make or distribute the thing (although that's certainly part of it).

The reason you need to wait so long is to prove its efficacy. By definition, you make a vaccine to give to everyone who is healthy and does not have the virus. So the absolute worst possible outcome would be to inject 95% of the population with a vaccine and discover in 6 months that it causes some horrible side effect.

> the vaccine will be well tested and released in under a year.

This is a bizarre misunderstanding of the vaccine development process.

Well the other option is that everyone already catches it by then, and we move in without the immediate need for a vaccine, depending on length of natural immunity. Which I think is becoming the more likely outcome, given the increase in non symptomatic carriers.

The catch will be if we attribute a drop off in hospital admits as successful containment or as the result of natural immunization/ herd immunity.

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