Thread by @cstross

The worst case for COVID is that we get semiannual mutant escape pandemics which kill about 1% of victims, until we get better vaccines with universal worldwide rollout faster than the infection/mutation loop, OR a wide-spectrum vaxx/antiviral. Could be decades …

/1

https://twitter.com/umairh/status/1472636231867674635

If you have a 1%/year chance of dying, BUT the pandemic keeps burning indefinitely, then after 35 years you're at about a 50% cumulative chance of being dead. That's a European Black Death level plague in slow motion. We can't afford that.

So …

/2

This is not like the Spanish flu—a single lethal strain of a normally-less-lethal virus: this is a normally MORE lethal vuris that learns to evade the immune response and comes roaring back every 6-9 months in a new strain.

/3

We are still in the early days. We might get lucky with vaccines, but if not, by 2030 the world will be unrecognizable (and I'll probably be dead because I'll be 66 with comorbidities and vaxxes won't stave off the inevitable indefinitely).

/4

When I say "unrecognizable" I mean travel will larely be curtailed. An entire generation of elderly politicians and oligarchs will have run out of luck and died, gasping, on ventilators. COVID will have destabilized intergenerational relations, politics, and economics.

/5

You can't sustain a gerontocracy indefinitely in the face of repeated waves of a plague that preferentially kills the elderly (especially if they don't believe in COVID "because muh freedoms").

/ (ends)

/2(a)

Your chance of dying in any given year is probably much lower than 1% *if* you are vaxxed and under 50. But then it goes up sharply. I'm assuming 1% overall … and folks aged over 70 will become rare, by and by.