Hope is not an ideal thing to hang your hat on, but sometimes it's the best we got. I guess the other thing that I'm hopeful for that isn't discussed here is that as some herd immunity builds up that the average viral load to which a naive person is exposed will decrease. This is bound to lessen severity of symptoms on average. Again, hope isn't much, but I think there's a good theoretical basis to believe that could be true.Because doctors managed to stop the SARS outbreak after about 8,000 cases, there’s never been a chance for anyone to get infected a second time, but those T cells could be a sign of ongoing immunity. A later vaccine study in mice found that memory T cells protected the animals from the worst effects when scientists tried infecting them again with SARS.
I mean, any immunity that is seasonal or unable to be vaccinated against and I don’t see how anyone can reach an even remotely positive conclusion that doesn’t involve the decline of society as we know it.
I dont think its deadly enough to to significantly affect population numbers. Its just that we cant have the response that we have now, we will just have to deal with it wear masks and accept that we are 2x as likely to die in 2020 than we were in 2019. Ideally we would build up hospital and funeral capacity to account for the increased mortality and that would be that. In reality things seem to be going the other way in we are instead decreasing hospital capacity so who knows.
It's definitely bad if that's the case, but I think it will be adaptable if we can get cheap, reliable, fast, widely-deployed testing. It would take a really big social commitment, but I think we're up to it. As much as quarantine sucks, all but the worst among us are taking it in stride, so I think we're capable of more than we think we are.
It's starting to look more like a textbook virus/pandemic: Coronavirus: South Korean scientists conclude people cannot be infected twice
I don’t think we can draw conclusions from that article. It basically says that suspected second cases were from bad tests. That does not demonstrate that people cannot be infected twice. Short term immunity would be indistinguishable from long term immunity atm.