Towards the corona endgame

On a global scale, coronavirus is still spreading, and there have been second waves in most countries that locked down and then reopened. Fortunately, vaccine news has been promising, Russia has authorized a vaccine (Sputnik-5), China is patenting a vaccine (Ad5-nCoV), etc. Management consultants McKinsey wrote three weeks ago that vaccines for critical personnel should become available in the fourth quarter of 2020 or first quarter of 2021 (e.g. in Russia I think doctors and teachers will be among those first vaccinated, and in China it seems that PLA soldiers were among the first immunized).

I am impatient to see concrete scenarios for how vaccines might be added to the existing national strategies involving hygiene, border control, renewed lockdowns to suppress second waves, etc. I particularly care about Australia and Canada, and the USA too because we are in its sphere of influence, but a coronavirus endgame scenario for any nation anywhere would be good to see.

By now such scenarios must have been secretly written for many big organizations, but they haven’t been made public. Big organizations use scenarios to think concretely about possibilities, but they only go public with definite plans, and the facts aren’t clear enough for them to announce plans with timelines yet.

Meanwhile, those of us out here in the big bad world could also use some scenarios, just to concretize our own thinking about when and how this all might end. At the web forum of “Quillette” magazine, I just speculated on how to construct such a scenario:

It would be nice to see someone spell out a concrete scenario (it doesn’t have to be a definite prediction or policy recommendation, just a scenario) of how judicious mass vaccination programs could finally secure a nation somewhere, against coronavirus. Surely all the ingredients needed to construct such a scenario now exist. Just pick a particular vaccine (e.g. in Australia it could be the UQ vaccine), make a hypothesis about how often it needs to be administered (e.g. every six months – I am making up that figure just to be concrete), suppose that it is approved after final phase testing and that manufacturing capability has been set aside (I heard that CSL could be a vaccine manufacturer for Australia), and then spell out a scenario of national deployment sufficient to create artificial herd immunity, along with continued monitoring of people entering the country, etc.