Now imagine that if after 20 years worth of deaths car accidents would just go away on their own. Not ideal, but it's better than the current state of affairs with car accidents.

> Now imagine that if after 20 years worth of deaths car accidents would just go away on their own.

We don't actually know that will happen with the virus, it could become like the flu and continue killing every year. We hope natural immunity will last but that is far from a given, it may only last months or years. A vaccine is also not a given, it's older brother SARS doesn't have one.

5 billion hosts gives an awful lot of room for mutations to occur, this thing is still in a new environment it's not adapted to.

Then there's the lasting health effects, it's possible it causes permanent lung damage and we have no idea if it leaves any landmines behind like chickenpox does.

You're not wrong, there is a small possibility that this virus does continuously mutate to keep us from becoming immune, and that we don't find a vaccine or a cure.

If so we're pretty thoroughly fucked. We aren't going to manage to wipe out this virus by shutting down the developed worlds economy's because the rest of the world (especially warzones and the like) isn't capable of doing the same. We can't keep the economy shut down forever to prevent spread in the developed world and not all starve to death.

I'd argue that the best response should that turn out to be true is to pour more resources into medical research until we do find a vaccine... which rather requires having functional stable economies instead of us all going bankrupt because we shut them down.

The virus mutates at a slower rate than the flu, of which we make a new vaccine for every year. So maybe we have a new corona vaccine every few years.

Funding for a SARS vaccine dried up, after SARS died off. The researchers have picked up where they left off with SARS for the covid vaccine.