You guys still aren’t grasping how bad this is. If a betacoronavirus of the SARS family becomes endemic in the population and mutates into new strains and people keep getting it over and over every flu season, then guess what? Those people who got fibrosis, renal damage, brain damage, and whatever the hell else this thing is doing? When they get infected again, they are going to die messily because the virus is going to attack and bring down their already-fucked-up organs. It’s a process of attrition, the chronic illness compounding and making people increasingly vulnerable until they expire.
It has very little evolutionary pressure to become less lethal, because of the long incubation period and the asymptomatic transmission. It can transmit between people as much as it likes while remaining deadly. Hardly any pressure at all for it to eventually fizzle out, mutate lower lethality, and become like a regular cold. Also, immunity to coronaviruses does not last very long. 6 months, max, and your body will no longer produce effective antigens.
We’re already through the looking glass. I bet that if this goes on for a decade and we don’t have a viable vaccine, or if it mutates into forms for which no vaccine exists (reminder that there is no such thing as a general flu or cold vaccine), then we’re all going to be in a post-apocalyptic gas mask dystopia where they call COVID-19 “The Crow”, and refer to peroxide as “Lifewater”, as people scavenge through a Metro or Fallout-like hellscape while gangs of gas-masked ruffians battle each other with nail bats and lead pipes. If we don’t act firmly and consistently, this virus could collapse civilization as we know it.