Dr. Lucky Tran 
Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC@luckytran I think the pandemic ends if and when we get an inhalable aerosol vaccine that causes sterile immunity against #SarsCoV2 , and we need to vaccinate as much of the population as possible, repeatedly, with updated vaccines against the latest variants. Only if we can bring a vaccine which actually stops virus transmission to the people will the pandemic truly end. Otherwise #Covid will just become endemic - well, #HIV is endemic, and #polio used to be endemic, we don't want that.
Nathanael NerodeSadly, that's magical thinking. Such vaccines don't exist and may never exist.
The pandemic ends when we #CleanTheAir with #HEPA and #CorsiRosenthalBoxes, and people use #P100 and #N95 respirators.
We stop cholera with clean water -- NOT with vaccines, which aren't good enough.
We stop Covid with clean air -- NOT with vaccines, which aren't good enough.
We don't drink dirty water, why do we breathe dirty air?
That's how this ends
#CovidIsAirborne #Covid
@LordCaramac @luckytran Cholera still exists. But it's endemic in places with dirty water, and almost nonexistent in places with clean water.
Covid will still exist. But if we #CleanTheAir, it'll be endemic in places with dirty air, but almost nonexistent in places with clean air...
#N95 and #P100 masks are the equivalent for an airborne disease of the "boil water order" for a waterborne disease
Why are people just drinking dirty water & breathing dirty air?
@neroden @luckytran I'm currently one of the less than 5% of people around here who still wear masks at supermarkets. And the politicians are too afraid of the conspiracy nuts to reinstate mask mandates, if they even want to. They all still think they're safe because they've been vaccinated and/or had the 'rona once. Popular media declare the pandemic is over while the healthcare system is collapsing. It's some kind of contagious collective madness. Air filters are often turned off in order to save energy, since due to the war Russian gas has become unavailable.
So I'm afraid we will probably see hundreds of thousands of newly disabled people suffering from chronic #LongCovid / #PostCovid in the future before people notice what's going on, and since chronic illness tends to be invisible, Long Covid doesn't really catch very much media attention. The antivaxx conspiracy nuts believe that the vaccine causes it, and since there are many who have recovered from Covid and haven't noticed any lasting damage so far, many people think of Long Covid as something rare and unusual.
I still think Long Covid is the new #PostPolio - we will have a lot of disabled people when this is over, if this ever ends. If this bloody SARS 2.x coronavirus becomes permanently endemic, it will do the kind of damage to our society nobody has seen who doesn't remember the #IronLung - outside of #malaria regions, that is. We'll just get a lot of newly disabled people year after year, people who just disappear because they spend their entire lives lying in bed and sitting on the couch. They'll be easy to ignore for a long time, I fear, as long as the public can be distracted by some public outrage about some migrant crime story or some politician who said something stupid.
An aerosol vaccine would be likely to stop most infections right in the nose at least for some time, so if we somehow managed to get virtually everyone to get a puff of the latest version every few months, we might be able to keep outbreaks small and limited. That, however, might not be possible without exposing at least parts of the population to the vaccine aerosol without their knowledge and consent, which is something no liberal democracy could pull off. China could, maybe China will. It is hard to stab people with a needle without their consent, but it should be rather easy to make them inhale something they don't want.
Sorry for the wall of text, my instance recently switched from 500 to 5000 characters, and now I'm just typing as if this was Tumblr.