[imagesource: Kim Sun-woong/Newsis/AP]

At present, there are only three things certain in this world.

Death, taxes, and an older relative forwarding on far too many videos via WhatsApp.

Please, older folk, exercise some restraint, both with forwarding those videos, and also with unsubstantiated, unverified, (and often untethered to reality) information.

You may also have read articles this weekend about the likelihood of our 21-day national lockdown being extended for months, but those were based on an outdated model and scenario.

The lockdown may well be extended, but we just don’t know at this point.

Thus, we also don’t really know how this will all end, although that hasn’t stopped people from having a bash.

Bloomberg gave it a shot with their article titled ‘When, and How, Does the Coronavirus Pandemic End?’, although there was the disclaimer that it’s a ‘quick take’.

Here are some of the more salient points:

There’s a consensus that the pandemic will only end with the establishment of so-called herd immunity. That occurs when enough people in a community are protected from a pathogen that it can’t take hold and dies out. There are two paths to that outcome. One is immunization. Researchers would have to develop a vaccine that proves safe and effective against the coronavirus, and health authorities would have to get it to a sufficient number of people. The second path to herd immunity is grimmer: It can also come about after a large portion of a community has been infected with a pathogen and develops resistance to it that way.

Whilst a 12 to 18-month timeline has been bandied around for vaccine development, not everybody agrees.

The Bloomberg article then talks about when restrictions can be lifted, citing Annelies Wilder-Smith, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, saying that restrictions should stay in place until daily cases drop consistently over at least a two-week period.

Even then, things don’t return to anything resembling normal:

A road map authored by a group of U.S. health specialists including former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb calls for an intermediate stage in which schools and businesses would reopen but gatherings would still be limited. People would continue to be encouraged to keep at a distance from one another, and those at high risk would be advised to limit their time in public.

If cases begin to rise again, restrictions would be tightened. Their report, published by the pro-business American Enterprise Institute, is arguably more optimistic than the future envisioned by researchers at Imperial College London.

Their models suggest that for at least two-thirds of the time until herd immunity is established, all households would need to reduce contact with schools, workplaces or the public by 75%.

Again, the above is focused on the UK and the US, and South Africa presents an entirely different challenge.

You can read the rest of that article here.

A widely-shared article since it was published on March 25 is this prediction by The Atlantic, titled ‘How the Pandemic Will End’.

The stats are clearly dated, as the virus continues to spread at an alarming rate across the US, but the predictions are worth reading.

Ed Yong says there are three possible endgames – “one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long”:

The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.

The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems…

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

That one is a long read, but well worth the time – finish it here.

One more to finish – the New Yorker magazine with ‘There Is No Plan For the End of the Coronavirus Crisis’.

Again, it’s a US context, but it does raise some interesting points:

…even relatively modest spread of a disease requires more than simple lockdown; it requires an aggressive program to identify those infected, isolate them, and monitor those they may have come into contact with…This is the “test and trace” method of pandemic containment; among public health experts, it is the ideal.

But in the U.S., and indeed throughout Europe as well, the pandemic has progressed much too far for this approach to work. And so — again, in theory — the current lockdowns could provide another opportunity, as well: buying the country time to ramp up a comprehensive testing regimen.

We would shelter in place until such a program was ready to go, then re-enter “normal” life through that portal of medical surveillance.

This program would be a dramatic change to American life — obligatory temperature checks, intrusive testing, and mandatory isolation in quarantine camps for anyone who’d even come into contact with a positive case — but it is the fastest path out of our current predicament.

Finish reading that here.

I guess the only thing that’s becoming clearer by the day is that we don’t really know what comes next.

Perhaps it is important now that we start a mindset shift from thinking about our own lockdown as a 21-day period, and start looking at it as the start of a new lifestyle that will continue to change as we deal with the virus’ spread going forward.

[sources:bloomberg&atlantic&newyorker]