Arguments over mask wearing, shouts against children going back to school, indignation over people not wearing masks in supermarkets and public transport, cries about whether the NHS can cope, demands for distancing to remain, crippled supply chains, shortage of HGV drivers, food and crops going to waste, empty shelves in the supermarkets, and so on.
At times it makes you wonder - why on earth did we bother developing a vaccine?
Which brings me round to the point of this post...
"Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine
This article is more than 1 year old
Politicians have become more cautious about immunisation prospects. They are right to be ...
... Why might a vaccine fail?
Earlier this week, England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said the words nobody wanted to hear: “We can’t be sure we will get a vaccine.”
But he was right to be circumspect....
More than 30 years after scientists isolated HIV, the virus that causes Aids, we have no vaccine...
..A chief concern is that coronaviruses do not tend to trigger long-lasting immunity.
.. "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... us-vaccine
Back at the beginning, there were dire warnings that we might never even get a vaccine.
It's now easy and very tempting to avoid the debate because, as it turns out, we don't just have one vaccine, but several, all of which have surpassed even the wildest hopes of scientists at least in terms of the protection offered against hospitalisation and death.
But imagine if the vaccines hadn't worked - imagine the results of the trials had come in, and none of them showed any signs of offering protection.
Here we would be, over a year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic... and now what?
Would or should the government have been able to treat us as perpetual prisoners, only allowed out for a few weeks each summer - it's citizens just pawns in a covid numbers game being played by the prime minister? Our individual existence serving only to manage covid numbers.
Or should the government have backed off the mandates and left it to every individual to decide their own level of risk?
Should there have been an alternative strategy of locking down by age, and letting younger, working age people carry on? After all, the high outbreaks in student lodgings didn't translate into high numbers of deaths.
Should the government have gone even further, and tried for elimination? Though the recent experience of New Zealand suggests that would unlikely have been successful... New Zealand having just admitted defeat on their elimination strategy, and now accepting it's going to spread.
I would be curious to hear people's thought's on this 'what if', though I'll be surprised if people are all that bothered about engaging with it, due to fatigue and reality now being different.
But if nothing else, I think just considering this 'what if' prospect, might at least provide some degree of perspective on the reality we now find ourselves in, vs the reality that we might have alternatively found ourselves in had the vaccine efforts turned out rather differently.
I mean, if nothing else, it's a reminder of just how far we've come.
Things like, putting it in perspective, is there really still any need to lose sleep over whether people in the supermarket choose to wear a mask or not? Really? Is there really still a need for the prime minister to refuse to rule out further lockdowns? Really? Come on.... get real!