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.