I've seen a couple good articles in the last few days that give good future and historical perspective for our current situation.
From the Washington Post, A coronavirus vaccine won’t change the world right away - as I've been saying, it really bothers me when people are like, "Oh once there's a vaccine, I'll ___," like everyone just goes out the next day, gets a shot, and the world is back to normal. It will still be years after the discovery of an effective vaccine before the world is anything close to "normal." Which then leads to The Atlantic's article, The Coronavirus Is Never Going Away. Their best case scenario is that we get it under control with vaccines and treatments, and it becomes a regularly circulating seasonal respiratory virus. They also postulate that the other four "common cold" coronaviruses also started as pandemics, before becoming commonplace.
I also read this fantastic article from Nova, What polio in post-WWII America can teach us about living in a pandemic. Of course I knew about the mid-20th century polio epidemic, but I didn't realize how many similarities there were to the current pandemic - for example, children having to stay indoors and away from friends, closing public places where people may gather, and turning to the radio for both entertainment and education while school openings were delayed. Of course, unlike today, people seemed to throw their trust into science and the government. Even after an initial vaccine sickened and killed numerous children, parents still had their children vaccinated. And people were maybe so into science that they went overboard with any treatment that may possibly help, like dousing everything with the chemical pesticide DDT. Once a safe vaccine was discovered, it was still many years before they were able to distribute it enough to effectively control the disease in the US.
Hopefully we can learn from the past, and be ready to face the future.
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