How long is this going to last?
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff and thanks for joining us for Plain English lesson 249. JR is the producer. Remember that you can find this full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/249.
Coming up today: we’re just a couple of weeks in, and a lot of people are starting to wonder, just how long is this going to last? When can we expect things to get back to normal? In the second half of today’s audio lesson, we’ll talk about what it means to be “stuck with” an option. And in the video lesson, we talk about how to use the word “given” when you have unchanging options. How to use “given” when something is unchangeable. That’s in the video lesson at PlainEnglish.com/249.
How long will social distancing be necessary?
The social distancing and self-quarantining have spread from China to large parts of Europe, North America, then South America, and now southeast Asia. The virus has infected people in 190 countries. It has overwhelmed the health systems of Italy and Spain. It has caused shops to close, restaurant workers to lose their tips, office workers to work from home, trains to run empty, and school classrooms to move online. It has caused physical symptoms for hundreds of thousands of people and of course it has caused a grave loss of life. When, you might be asking, is this going to end?
The answer is easy and difficult at the same time. The easy answer is that this will end when a large portion of the population has immunity. Once between sixty and eighty percent of a population has immunity to a disease, then it stops spreading quickly: that situation is called “herd immunity.” It will still infect new people, but its spread will be slow and its symptoms manageable. We will all be able to go back to work and school.
The problem is getting to that sixty to eighty percent immunity level. There are only two ways to get there: either we all catch it or we get a vaccine. Neither option is an easy answer.
Let’s start with the vaccine. As we mentioned back in Lesson 230, the process of developing a vaccine is a long one. Optimistic estimates are a year. A proper vaccine needs to be developed, then tested for safety, then tested on large populations for effectiveness. This is all not to mention the enormous challenge of manufacturing enough doses of the vaccine and then distributing them to the population. It could take a year to develop the vaccine, and then many more months to manufacture and distribute it.
In the absence of a vaccine, what’s left? The other, grim option is to let the virus run its course through the population. When most people catch the virus, their bodies develop antibodies that fight it. They get sick the first time, but the antibodies will protect them if they ever encounter it again. It’s not a fun way to develop immunity, but it works. Ask anyone who had the chicken pox as a child: it works similarly.
Immunity like this would come at a tremendous human cost. Even if only a small percentage of people die after catching the virus, that still means millions of people would have to die for the world to develop herd immunity.
Given those two choices, a vaccine would be preferable. But in the meantime, we’re stuck with the second option: developing herd immunity. The question now is, how can we make this as painless as possible. Current efforts at social distancing are an effort to “flatten the curve.” That is an acknowledgement that a lot of people will still get the virus, but it will move through the population more slowly and allow hospitals to cope more easily with the volume of patients getting sick at any one time.
The downside to social distancing is that, well, the virus spreads more slowly and we develop our immunity more slowly. So we have to live in this altered universe for longer.
Let’s go back to the question I opened the lesson with: when is this going to end? It is possible that, as the virus moves through a greater and greater percentage of the population, and as testing becomes more available, that governments will gradually be able to loosen the controls on daily life.
A person who has had the virus will, for the most part, not be able to catch it again and spread it. So if you suffered through the symptoms and recovered, you’re not going to spread it to a lot of other people. Who knows—you may have had the virus and not even known it. Governments may decide that they can relax social distancing rules for people who have developed immunity to the virus.
We also don’t know how the virus affects different types of people. The simple fact is, all the statistics on this virus are flawed because so few tests have been administered. Large-scale testing would tell us, how many people have developed immunity in a population? Out of those people, how many suffered symptoms? With knowledge like that, selective relaxation of social distancing and quarantine guidelines might be in order.
Maybe we get restaurants, but only with room to sit down at tables spaced apart. Maybe offices re-open but only at fifty percent capacity, and no more sharing desks. Maybe sports leagues start up again, but without large crowds.
When is this going to happen? Probably not soon. It all depends on how quickly large-scale testing can happen, how sensibly governments respond, and how quickly a vaccine might be developed. When this first started, it seemed like the quarantine and social distancing might last a few months. Now, it’s starting to look like some degree of social distancing is going to be here for quite some time.
Here’s a quick reminder that we’re going to be doing live events on Zoom to support you during these times of social distancing. If you’d like to be a part of those, you should do two things. First, make sure to get on our email list at PlainEnglish.com/mail. Any time we post a new event, we’ll tell those of you on the e-mail list first. And we’ll be having events that are only open to e-mail subscribers. Those are the targeted country events.
If you’d like the browse the larger events we have scheduled, you can do so on the web site. We set up a special page on PlainEnglish.com just to showcase these events. Go to PlainEnglish.com/live for the latest schedule and to register. Registration is free. JR and I would love to see you by video call, so check out the schedule at PlainEnglish.com/live.
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