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Comment by barbacoa | Hacker News Reader

There are reports that vaccines may only be somewhat effective and even when effective confer immunity for mere months. Now we are hearing that this virus can reinfect people like the coming cold.

What if we can never rid the world of covid? At what point do we just return to our lives the way it was before all this and accept this super dangerous version of the flu as part of our new world?

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I'm baffled how "just return to our lives" shows up as a foregone conclusion in the way many people think about this disease.

The most realistic path to managing COVID is herd immunity. -> Just return to our lives.

We may never achieve COVID herd immunity. We'll just keep getting it over and over. -> Just return to our lives.

Sure, let's imagine a world where we accept widespread and repeated COVID infection as a presence in the average person's life. That means we should immediately, in every organized society, start planning for:

- Significant growth in the numbers of the long-term disabled: Planning living environments for a population with chronic and lifelong respiratory damage. Many of us will be unable to run, distances we are expected to be able to reasonably cross on foot will shrink, and a lot fewer of us will be able to do manual labor such as construction or do jobs that require prolonged standing.

- Planning for a vastly reduced employment, either because entire segments of the economy are no longer in demand, or because a lot fewer of us can take on certain jobs because of disability.

- Significantly reduced average lifespans: changes to policies around retirement age, senior housing, life and health insurance policies, etc.

I think saying "just return to our lives" obligates someone to describe what we should start doing to be able to live the kind of lives we will return to!

I think it's interesting how freaked out people get when they realize how powerless we can be as a species even with all our technology.

I'm baffled that "flatten the curve" is now "lock down until further notice".

If you want to understanf how "flatten the curve" turns into "lock down until further notice" you first need to take into consideration the fact that a) this phenomenon only happens in free democratic countries where the people have a say in picking their government, b) covid19 infection rates and deaths is used extensively by populist opposition parties to stir discontent torwards incumbent parties in particular but democratic regimes in general.

We...don't ? The world never "returned" from AIDS for example, but we found ways to mitigate its propagation while a cure is searched. Masks may very well be the new condom I suppose ?

1. If the reinfection is totally asymptomatic, including not having quiet heart damage or walking pnumonia, then everything is fine. 2. I'll have an appointment every few months to get a booster.

We need to continue building a pattern of research findings, but existing preliminary research shows that overwhelming numbers of recovered patients develop dangerous complications, such as pericarditis.

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