[quote=FlyerInHi]The whole controversy over hydroxychloroquine seems to indicate that the government is in panic mode. They are shifting to worrying about treatment as more and more people get sick. Maybe they are not so confident a vaccine can be developed and rolled out soon.
Plus “flattening the curve” just means pulling on the right and spreading the numbers over a longer period. This will prolong lockdowns and the effects on the economy.
A vaccine in the near future is a pipe dream. You’ve got at least 1 and more likely multiple winter flu seasons before you could ever hope for a mass scale reliable vaccine. Forms of coronavirus have been around for a long time, they cause the common cold and vaccines have been worked on but never succeeded in decades. It’s really unlikely that you’ll see a vaccine anytime soon if at at. The best approach is probably can you find some sort of remedy that makes getting the disease less likely to be fatal. There’s a bit of promise with hydroxychloroquine which has been around for a long time as prophylaxis for malaria. It side-effects are generally minor and understood. It’s a 50 year old drug. It wont work for everybody but it might work for some cases that become serious enough to warrant it.
You’ll never get this thing under control unless you reach herd immunity hopefully with mild cases. It’s r0 is close to 3 and it seems like in certain situations it’s way higher than that. If social distancing was a real solution you would have seen significant decrease in cases after 10 days and we really haven’t. There’s definitely other vectors of spread that don’t involve coughing/droplets which is letting this thing linger. Most likely it’s the hospitals where unhealthy people that don’t have covid-19 are forced to go for other reasons and then pick up the virus from there and bring it back to wherever they came from.
