You can think about this as political, or you can think about the differences as being a result of how different viruses interact with the body. Which is super different.
Polio? Polio infects you systemically and attacks your nerves. Since your antibodies and T-cells are in your bloodstream where the virus needs to work, a vaccine CAN prevent infection and nerve damage. And the vaccine is EASY to make, you just inject polio virus proteins or attenuated virus. (Smallpox was also easy, bc it needs to get into you skin, which is full of immune cells.)
AIDS? HIV infects your immune system itself! Very sneaky that. And after 40 years, we don't have a working vaccine.
Common Cold (including the other 4 coronaviruses)? We have all heard 'we can land people on the moon, but we can't find a cure for the common cold!' Why? Bc as I said, the cold virus just infects your ENT cells, and only needs to do that to replicate and get transmitted. And its almost impossible for your immune cells to protect that first line of defense in your body. The virus doesn't (and doesn't need to) infect you systemically. We COULD make a vaccine against the common cold (it would be easy), but all it would do is reduce the odds of you getting a cold somewhat, for a little while. And since no healthy people die from colds, there would be no market for that protection.
So when Covid happened, if you read the actual scientific literature at the time (as I did) or understood basic virology, you knew 99% that it would be like the common cold case, and not like AIDS (no vax for decades) OR polio (easy vax that wipes out the disease).
But we also knew that a NEW coronavirus could kill. Remember the 1890 virus. OG Covid has a death rate of 1-2%, which is a lot higher than its coronavirus cousins that we have all had a bunch of times. But there is nothing obviously that different between Covid and those others, except that we have never had it before, and thus zero antibodies and T-cells. For the other 4, we are getting them for the first time as children, and already have antibodies (like getting vaxed) from our mothers and mother's milk. Just like how babies born after 2030 will all be protected from covid without a shot.
So any virologist would have told you by mid 2020 that the most likely end game for the pandemic was to kill 1-2% of the world population over the course of a few years, and then covid would settle down to an endemic virus that kills very few people, **just like** the last new pandemic coronavirus in 1890. IOW, it would kill 50-100 M people worldwide in a few years without any mitigation It was this (still correct) projection that led to lockdowns and masking. Duh. Delay the spread until we can get everyone vaxxed.
The world is still less than half vaxxed (with GOOD vaccines) after 2 years, and the global death total is a bit over 10M (deaths are significantly underreported overseas). That is a LOT of saved lives (again, most of them overseas) bc of masking and mitigation. This death number will continue to climb until the world gets fully vaxxed, but it will hopefully come in under 20M. Mitigation and vaccination will have saved 30-80 M lives worldwide. AWESOME. Go Science and public health!
And all of the above was well known and predictable to anyone who could and did read the science, in mid-2020. Period.
It could've gone different ways:
--The virus could've mutated to get more deadly (they do that sometimes). MERS is a coronavirus that has a 20% death rate in unvaxxed people! 20%! And it raged through Korea causing a mass panic in 2015. That is why the asian countries are all great at masking... they had a big scare with a virus with 10x the death rate of Covid just 5 years prior. So they don't eff around over there.
--The virus could mutate to become less deadly. It looks like Omicron is 50% less deadly. It kills 0.5-1% of the unvaxxed, unlike the 1-2% of earlier strains. Bit too high for my comfort, but that means that the original 100M global deaths without mitigation, would 'only' be 50M with Omicron (or 3000 Million with MERS). The unvaxxed caught a big break. 50% lower chance of death.
--Everyone could've gotten vaxxed and boosted (if eligible) in the US. This didn't happen. If this had happened, there still would have been a Delta wave and an Omicron wave (which started overseas). You still would've started getting covid sometimes, just like we all will in the future. But the death and hospitalization rates would be far lower than they have been, and we would've gotten 'back to normal', maybe wearing masks for a month or two in some public settings, way earlier than we have.
--There are anti-vax people in every country. In fact there are similar numbers of them. On the scale of mandates and forced vaccination, the US is, predictably, not doing that very much at all. We do allow our citizens to make a lot of dumb choices that people in other countries are not allowed to make. That is also not really a surprise to anyone.
--The reopening while the virus is still circulating now? Also predictable. Had to happen. In every other pandemic in history the population gets to the point of being done with mitigation. In a couple years. Look in a history book. And so the goal was always to use mitigation (which has a finite time limit) to limit the spread (and deaths) until we could get everyone vaxxed. If everyone had gotten vaxxed last summer (and boosted this winter), we would've ended mitigation sooner (!) than we did. Right now we have vaxxed people doing mitigation not bc they are stupid or coerced or misinformed, but to protect the unvaxxed! And they are tired of doing that. I still wear masks at work and on the train, which is a PITA, not bc I am in any danger from Covid (I'm not), but on the off chance that I could spread the virus to a (willingly) unvaxxed person. But the vaxxed and masking people are DONE. You unvaxxed people had your chance to protect yourselves, now you can face the consequences of not doing so. For 90+% of you, those will be minimal. Good luck.
www.cidrap.umn.edu
