The latest report on COVID-19 projections was published this week by the Imperial College of London. You can read it at this link:
As expected it is not good news. According to their models, if we don’t adhere to strict restrictions we will drastically overwhelm our healthcare system. This would lead to hard choices about who gets treatment and who dies. Not to mention exhaustion and illness among healthcare providers.
In their conclusions they make this statement:
A minimum policy for effective suppression is therefore population-wide social distancing combined with home isolation of cases and school and university closure.To avoid a rebound in transmission, these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available to immunise the population–which could be 18 months or more.
Wow!
Since they recognize that maintaining these restrictions for 18 months or more would be incredibly difficult, they also modeled another scenario where the restrictions are turned on until cases drop, then some restrictions are lifted, then turned back on when cases rise again. This happens over and over until a vaccine is available. In Great Britain their model shows restrictions would be in force two-thirds of the time under that scenario.
You can read the study yourself. Bottom line is this is likely to be with us for a long time.