03-27-2020, 05:37 PM
(03-27-2020, 05:23 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: If you mean, completely back to normal, schools reopened, covid was like a passing dream, no, that's not going to happen.
For completeness, I'll present two theories for why things will get back to normal completely. I don't believe either of them, but they might serve as a good counterbalance to the doomsaying that's rampant.
Both of these theories rely on the fact that all covid epidemics that have risen to a problematic number of cases so far have peaked and gone away with a much lower peak that simple models of the disease would predict.
The first theory, which I saw in an article citing an Israeli scientist, is that the reason the peak is so low is because most people already have preexisting immunity. By this theory, I guess, most people have gotten immunity from other coronaviruses that cause colds. The epidemic only rips through the small fraction of people who don't have such immunity.
The second theory is that there are so many more cases than are detected that the visible peaks are just the tip of the iceberg, and instead of affecting only the 1% of the population that are identified to have disease, actually something like 50% of the population gets it, and the 1% are only the most serious cases.
I have reasons I don't believe either of these theories, but they aren't any more ridiculous than some of the doomsaying that's going around.