This is an honest question.
It looks like no one is aiming to drive covid cases low enough that you could rely much more than today on contact tracing or local lockdowns in response to outbreaks. And I assume that we aren’t aiming to keep up current levels of precaution indefinitely. If that’s all true, then we will eventually reach an equilibrium where R=1 despite us behaving much less conservatively (as we do with other diseases).
If current precautions are just delaying the spread of covid, and we’ll need to build the same immunity sooner or later, then what’s our goal? I’ll list four options; none of them seem compelling to me, but I think that I could easily be making a mistake (also the real justification may just turn out to be uncompelling to me). There may also be something else big I’m missing.
Immunity can be built by vaccination rather than infection. This seems most plausible to me. But at this point most Americans are vaccinated (80-90% of people over 65, 60-70% 12 and up) and <0.2% of people are getting vaccinated each day. If the vaccine lost half of its effectiveness after a year (>0.1%/day), then we seem pretty close to equilibrium with respect to immunity from vaccination. Moreover, vaccines are readily available to anyone over 12 in the US who wants them, and it’s pretty uncomfortable to pause life while we wait for people who don’t want vaccines to change their minds. Are there forecasts about how high vaccination levels will realistically get and how big a difference it makes? Have the last months of lockdowns effectively just been waiting for FDA approvals, and will we give up after they approve things and we get one last push of vaccinations and mandates?
Slowing infections preserves hospital capacity. But if we are taking expensive society-wide interventions to preserve hospital space, then it seems like we should be running hospitals at the highest sustainable throughput. As far as I can tell COVID patients currently occupy less than 15% of hospital beds (e.g. https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization), and most hospitals are not taking extreme measures to increase their available capacity or maximize utilization. Put differently, if this is the story then the marginal cost of 1% longer covid precautions should be comparable to the marginal benefits of 1% more hospital capacity, but those values seem to differ by more than an order of magnitude.
Treatment may improve. But after multiple years I’d expect further improvement to be very slow, and I haven’t heard about many changes recently.
COVID in the US may drive the evolution of new variants or may spread cases to countries with less vaccine access, so we may want to delay until other people have similar levels of vaccine access. But it doesn’t seem like US cases are driving a significant fraction of global spread right now. And with respect to variants, having a long period with low levels of COVID seems intuitively worse than having the same number of infections faster (since it’s more likely that multiple mutations accumulate in the same line), though that’s pretty much a guess. And more generally, we are a bunch of selfish assholes in every other domain and there are a thousand better things we can do to help the rest of the world, so I’m skeptical this is a big part of it.
I have similar questions at the level of the rationalist/EA community. My expectation would be that COVID immunity fades over a few years and so the average person will be exposed to it 10+ times over their life. Is that basic picture wrong? Are people hoping to avoid being exposed a bunch of times by being unusually cautious? Or are they hoping that exposure will get less and less dangerous over time (and if so why)?