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Originally Posted by wdb
I'm thinking that SIP and the like will die sooner rather than later. People are going to start saying "f**k it" and just go out again. I already see hints of it here and we're just wrapping up week #3. But that won't be everyone. I suspect that people who are truly at greater risk of serious consequences from the virus will stay holed up for quite some time. But there will be more people out and about to help those folks.
The next big move will be when the antibody test becomes widely available. I'd like to think that will be within 6 or 8 weeks but I may be optimistic. A positive for antibodies is a "get out of jail" card AND it means that person will not infect ANYONE. A valuable thing. Once we have a significant number of those people, then the return to something resembling what we used to have will start to happen.
But people will continue to get sick from, and die of, COVID-19 for a long, long time. Until there is a vaccine. And we'll need to be very careful around the vulnerable people until then.
And I think we will see masks on people in the US as a normal sight from this point onward. Maybe folks who are sick will wear them to keep from getting other people sick; that would be nice. But mostly I expect it will be the paranoid folks and conspiracy theorists.
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There are reports of people who caught it more than once. We have to put more into scientific research. What we know about viruses is that they self replicate fast so the rate of mutation, although random, happens at various speeds depending on number of hosts. The more hosts that a virus comes in contact with, the more it replicates and the more mutations are preserved. The race to find a vaccine isn't with each other but a race with the virus. We want to stamp it out before it mutates further.