Moving goalposts

A lot of people are concerned at the fact that policy makers appear to be moving the goal posts in an attempt to flatten the curve. The point of flattening the curve was to slow down the rate of spread so that the numbers of severe cases would not overwhelm the healthcare system. By this point, i'm sure you've all seen something like this..

I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed. I am not against measures to flatten the curve. Reducing the total number of deaths is good, and measures to not overwhelm the health care system achieves this at the margin. But the question remains, can this really be something we can achieve and sustain? Is there anything that prevents the virus from spreading once we open up more? I don't think maintaining social distancing -enforced or voluntary- is viable long term.

Some people think that we have to "flatten the curve" until we have a vaccine, others think that we will go in and out of varying degrees of lockdown as we battle the r0. However, it seems clear to me that the devastation to people's livelihoods (yes i'm talking about the "economy") would be far too costly to do so.

It's only been a few months and we have a record number of unemployed people living on the brink of poverty. Our food supply chain is about to collapse. People speak of a severe recession, but this feels more depression-esque.

Is a vaccine even possible?

Something I knew but had admittedly not thought about - we have never developed an effective vaccine for a coronavirus. If we can accomplish this, it would be a first. And where does that 12-18 month figure come from, given that vaccines normally take about ten years to develop, and no effective coronavirus vaccine has been developed even in that time frame? It appears to have been pulled out of someone's ass.

I think we have to consider the very real possibility that we're not going to "beat" this virus, but that it's going to become a permanent, or at least very long-term problem that we'll have to live with. Scientists have long known that such an event is possible. What that would do to the population that has the relevant comorbidities, which includes a large proportion of the elderly population, is horrible to contemplate.