And you know this why?
Know what? That it'll mutate to a less lethal form? I don't. I said, EITHER it does so, OR we end up just accepting it as another way people die, like cancer and heart disease. Because we simply are not going to spend the next 100 years all standing on little yellow dots 1.5m apart at stores, and having no people move from one country to another, and having (as in Australia) over half the working population not working and subsisting on government support.
As I noted much earlier, because of our modern Western lifestyle, we have a certain number of people die each year. Our choice as a society to have cars means people die on the roads. Our choice as a society to have available couches and McDs means people die of cancer and heart disease. Our choice as a society to have firearms means people are shot by accident or on purpose. Our choice as a society to have alcohol available means people die of heart and liver disease, and there are sometimes public brawls and more often domestic violence. Our choice as a society to use lots of fossil fuels means people die from pollution and the climate changes. Our choice as a society to live with a lot of electronics means that children are enslaved in mines in the Congo, and some of them die in conflicts.
And so on and so forth. As a society, we have chosen a certain lifestyle, which means a certain number of people die preventable deaths and suffer needlessly. We haven't hugely changed our lifestyle for any of the other lethal dangers, and so I don't see why we will do so for covid-19. It may be that we
should change things for one or more of those issues, but I do not think we
will.
Temporarily, of course, is another thing. But long-term, we will change things to the very minimum extent we can - yes, even if it means people die of this virus.
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I don't think your point is entirely true. Think about the things that we've done in the past that was novel, simply in order to prevent disease. There was great resistance to medical professionals washing their hands and their tools. Now we expect it. We also expect clean water (cholera). We expect to have safe sex conversations with new partners (HIV). I don't think it's at all unrealistic to expect that behaviour will change permanently as a result of this as well. Obviously, like with the couch and McDonalds, not everyone will take up new behaviours, but the majority will.