That or accept the 0.5 percent death rate with the "flatten the curve" method where we all catch it.
Your concern means we'd only have situation 1, quarentine for 1 or 2 years.
They feed off each other.
And HN isn't entirely immune. I see some of it happening here too, though it is not as prevalent as on Reddit.
Also, look at the argument, not the user. You have appeal to authority fallacy.
The reason is that people are far too quick to leap to this interpretation, and since we have next to no data about each other from HN posts, pretty much every divisive topic gets drowned in such insinuations if allowed to.
Lots more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
* Mandatory mask usage
* Mandatory temperature checks in certain places (restaurants, airports, etc?)
* Many companies continuing their WFH policies
* Greatly expanded testing and contact tracing, allowing local outbreaks to be more easily contained
* Quarantines for high risk individuals
It's not like somewhere like China got to lower numbers now because most of them got it and are immune. As percentage of population the number that got it is quite small. They got control of the situation because the people who had it didn't spread and they recovered. Now they are vulnerable to it being reintroduced. But they don't need full lockdown.
So another scenario is that active cases subside and we don't travel or amass in large groups for a while. This is short of your two year quarantine (which by the way you didn't spell correctly, a hint for how to spell it is that it derives from Italian 'quaranta', meaning 40, for a 40 day isolation).
This is unfeasible for most of the population, and a vaccine may not work at all (people assume it will, but there's no guarantee). If they work, drugs are what will be needed to turn the tide short-term.
Deadly, contagious virus with no vaccine, which takes roughly 18 months. There aren't too many options. I've heard chatter that big co's started telling their employees they're planning 18 months WFH.
Once the disease surge in densely populated ends areas it appears to become quite manageable.
We'll probably wear masks this entire time, and there'll probably another closure next time the disease surges. Until we find an effective treatment or a vaccine.
If there's a second wave, we'll probably need those containment measures again just to bring it down to the flu level.
If this were a raging pandemic this would not be the case.
E. Asian countries use a strict screen-and-test routine (+ a few restrictions), and if/when that slips they turn to a lockdown until they can control the outbreak enough to return to screen-and-test (e.g. Singapore just these recent days). That's a data point, but I don't think it supports the 'just get back to usual' POV. The US has far more entry points than Singapore, even after it manages to control the disease internally.
The UK abandoned their no-lockdown policy because it didn't work.
That leaves us with.. Sweden which doesn't look good at all compared to its neighbours which have locked down?
Honest question: do you think a second quarantine will be as effective as the first? Tracing and isolation after the first quarantine must be as close as spotless as possible, because personally I don't believe that the population will tolerate a second lock-up as easily as the first.
Public will may decline/increase depending on country and political climate, but enforcement, tracking and treatment mechanisms will have improved everywhere. So a 2nd quarantine need not be as effective as the first, and overall, governments that will want to lock down will be able to do it.
The real question is whether a political/economical calculation will delay a 2nd quarantine unnecessarily in cases it is necessary.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/singing-stops-...
Governments and their expert panels can't just think that people will "reprogram" themselves to stay away from most social contacts. It's alienating at best and outright dangerous for one's mind at worst.
Once the number of cases gets low, it won't be possible, or justifiable, to keep people locked up. Even more so that some countries that were affected after my own have already begun their plans to lift lockdowns (some with definite dates, some without).