To be a bit more upbeat than my last post… What will happen is the transmission rates of all communicable diseases will drop. We’ll have less colds, less flus. We’ve put the brakes on the spread of germs in general — at least until we go back to normal, and they go back to normal.

• The SARS-2 (COVID) virus will burn out.

SARS-2 has demonstrated its ability to linger in populations, so even if the SFBA manages to rid itself of SARS-2, carriers entering the area will restart the local spread.

• There will be effective prophylaxis available.

Vaccines take much, much longer than that to develop, so we’re not going to see one that quickly. If we had a vaccine to SARS-1, there’d be a slim chance that it’d also immunize against SARS-2, but we’re out of luck there.

• Treatment will be substantially better.

Same as above. Treatments tailored specifically to a disease take time to develop and improve. The potential exceptions would be already existing SARS, coronavirus-general, or broad-spectrum antivirals. But if any of those showed significant efficacy against SARS-2, we’d already know about it. So we’re not buying revolutionary improvements in treatment, but incremental ones.

• The shelter-in-place order will be honored.

People are going to get fed up as the days, then weeks, drag by, and even today I saw kids practicing soccer on the Eastshore field.

Don’t get me wrong — there are good odds that a vaccine will be developed or that better treatments will arrive, and combining those with natural resistance means there’s a very good chance that the disease will be stopped. But the new treatments and prophylaxis will take longer than three weeks to happen. And sadly, that means this disease is unlikely to be stopped before it sweeps through our population, and a three-week shelter-in-place won’t change that.