Simply put, we must ‘flatten the curve‘ and crawl along it until that vaccine — or another effective treatment — arrives. (And likely for a while afterwards.)
According to the World Health Organisation, there are currently more than 60 SARS-Cov-2 vaccines in development, and experts have predicted it will take 12-18 months before any has been proven safe to be administered to millions.
While we wait, watching the number of cases of COVID-19 claw beyond 1.2 million and deaths into the 72,000s is a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable we really are. But it also throws into sharp relief how much we, in affluent countries, take incredible technology like vaccines for granted.
The World Health Organisation estimates that vaccination prevents roughly 2-3 million deaths every year. And it’s because of vaccination that the world is entirely free of smallpox (a disease that killed…