What a great precedent! Now we can just keep the (declaration of) pandemic going for the next 10 years, and we have license to shut down anything we like!

I go to a large gathering every week. It’s called the supermarket. In light of that, it seems silly to suspend civil rights.

Maybe the supermarkets here are different?

We all keep good spacing (1.5m) between each other, wear face masks, etc.

Very, very different to the protests apparently, judging by the photos in the newspapers.

Don't be surprised if that takes, er, a while to happen

So do you people who keep telling everyone dictatorship is next whenever anything happens get tired of being wrong literally every time?

I missed the bit where I told anyone that dictatorship was next.

Oh, so what was the implication of your comment meant to be? Why is the government not going to end the pandemic measures anytime soon?

I said nothing about governments, just that the pandemic is not ending any time soon. It will be with our grandchidren, and theirs.

But why is the pandemic not ending? It seems strange that with the rollout of vaccines it would last for another 50 years.

You think it can be beaten? I doubt it (and I'm not alone in thinking that). Even if vaccine coverage were 99% everywhere the world (it won't be), and it were 99% effective (it's not) there will still be a reservoir of virus in cats, deer, gerbils ... time will tell I guess, but I think it more likely that our species will accept that it's not going away by declaring it "endemic" rather than "pandemic", as with flu.

A pandemic is the rapid spread international spread of a disease. Key word: rapid.

Question: why is there not a flu pandemic every year? Answer: because the flu is not a novel virus, and does not hit the population in the same way. The flu can be very severe, which is why we vaccinate against it, but within any given population there is a multitude of degrees of existing immunity from previous rounds of flu through the population.

COVID-19 is a novel virus - no human on Earth until 1.5 years ago had ever been infected with it, and it's spread follows the expectation of a novel virus: with no prior immunity, the entire population is initially infectable.

This, obviously however, is not a continuing situation: prior infection with COVID-19 confers immunity against COVID-19, as well as effective immunity against the variant mutations which have arisen. There have not been cases of reinfection within over a year. Even if COVID-19 can infect vaccinated populations, it does so with less severe outcomes, and having done so leaves behind a reservoir of now immune recipients.

In fact even if a new COVID-19 strain arose well after infection, people who had been exposed or vaccinated to earlier strains would not present the sort of completely vulnerable population which the initial COVID-19 virus represented.

COVID-19 is now going to be an endemic disease, but that hardly means people will keep catching up, but instead that in any given year a small subset of the population is likely to contract it and recover - possibly requiring medical intervention, but this is a number which can be managed and planned for.

What has made COVID-19 a problem though, is the novel nature of the virus and it's rapid spread. We are perfectly able to deal with expected loads on healthcare, but not with a surge of 10-20% of the entire population of a country within a 6-12 month window with over a month of recovery time. But against a vaccinated population that figure falls by almost 92-96%, with 60-70% of people never developing symptoms. That is a manageable number over the same time frame.

COVID-19 is not like the flu, and infectious novel diseases will always require immediate and drastic countermeasures. An ideal outcome for COVID-19 would have been containment in Wuhan: it would have lent plenty of time to develop, test, and incorporate into routine vaccine schedules innoculations against it.