- There will be a COVID-19 vaccine. I keep reading that things won't truly go back to normal until we have a vaccine (and also that a vaccine may take 12-18 months to develop and distribute widely). But what if we don't find a vaccine that works? There are still some viral illnesses for which we have never found a vaccine, viruses that have been studied for decades longer than COVID-19. People who know more about this stuff than I do say a vaccine is in the works, but it is clear that a working vaccine has not been discovered yet. There is no guarantee we will ever find one.
- People will continue to follow the stay-at-home rules until the government comes up with a plan to let everyone out. Right now, at least in the U.S., compliance with the various State "shelter-in-place" orders has been mostly voluntary. The government is not stopping cars and asking people to prove they are just going to get groceries and not going to somewhere they should not be going under the order. The police are not roving around looking for people standing closer than 6 feet (2 meters) from each other. In other countries the police are doing those things. But here at least, people are following the shelter-in-place orders because they are on-board with the effort and willingly going along, or are socially pressured to go along with it. What if this drags on and people stop complying? I can imagine it getting to a point where people say, "fuck it. I'm going crazy in here. I'm just going to take my chances and live my life again." Once a certain threshold is reached of non-compliers, we could be seeing a majority of people ignoring the government restrictions, no matter what government authorities have ordered about a timetable for "opening up the country."
Damn. I thought there was a third thing but now I can't remember what it was.
