Is anyone else sick and tired of hearing about COVID-19? It’s like the nightmare that just won’t end.
News updates, friends talking, masks everywhere, shut down businesses – and on, and on, and on.
Sadly it may be that way for quite awhile, as a new report estimates that the pandemic won’t end for much longer than most people expect.
They calculated their estimation based on the current rate of vaccination, looking at how long it would take to immunize most of the world against the coronavirus.
I have been working a lot since the last year, even with the corona pandemic starting we were lucky to have enough work until this month.
I'm getting laid off from work, there's no new work coming right now, no clue how long this will go.
— Samura1man (@Samura1man) February 2, 2021
How Long Will the Pandemic Last?
According to a large database from Bloomberg, the current vaccination rate means that it will take around seven years until the pandemic will genuinely be over.
You heard that right.
Seven. Damn. Years.
There are currently 119 million vaccine shots that have been given around the world. Experts say it will be safe to be in public and stop masking and all that once about 70 to 85 percent of people are vaccinated.
At the current rate the whole world will be “safe” in seven years, but other richer countries such as Israel and the United States are in much better shape. The US should be “safe” and good to return to normal by the end of this year, while Israel should be safe to be out and about in only two months.
Other countries are likely to take multiple years, in some cases up to seven and in the case of Canada 10 years to get to 75 percent vaccination.
Will Biden Keep Borders Closed?
President Joe Biden reimposed travel bans that President Trump wanted lifted, but what will he do once the US is safe. Travel bans are “racist” and evil, we are told, so will he keep them in place if it’s for the safety of the vaccinated US population or relax them in order to be very progressive?
He’s already trying to pause deportations for 100 days and migrant caravans are headed to the border hoping for some of that Biden amnesty, so it’s clear that public health is not exactly at the top of Biden’s list despite his self-righteous rhetoric.
Vaccinations are expected to ramp up worldwide as places like Mexico and India start churning out huge shipments, with billions ordered already in large contracts, but with just over 30% of countries even having begun their vaccinations it’s clearly going to take awhile to get this show on the road.
What About Herd Immunity?
As Dr. Anthony Fauci and others have said, herd immunity is hard to definitively pinpoint. That’s part of the reason for his constant flip-flopping, presumably. Does herd immunity mean that transmission slows down massively because so many people are vaccinated or does it mean that even once it spreads in a group of unvaccinated people it basically dies out without spreading outside of that cluster?
It’s possible herd immunity could start kicking in before 75 percent so it really depends how you look at it and how careful you want to be.
In any case, it’s important that people keep asking questions about their health authorities and their campaigns to vaccinate. It’s also important that vaccine safety and efficacy be fully explained, since the worst thing would be for it to turn out that the vaccines have harmful long-term effects which weren’t known or that the vaccines actually are ineffective against the new strains of COVID that are emerging from Brazil, South Africa and Japan.
At the end of the day everyone needs to pull together to get through this time, but seven more years of lockdowns and quarantine is unimaginable and unacceptable.
