pandemic is going to last years.
Comparisons to the 1918 flu pandemic aren't really valid, not just because this isn't an influenza. Back then, as terrible as that pandemic was, a significant percentage of people already had at least some immunity. Especially older people who'd been through a similar flu outbreak a half century earlier. Also, for decades now people have been predicting another devastating flu outbreak, mainly because influenza is always out there, always mutating.
For what it's worth, there was essentially no flu season in the southern hemisphere this year, mainly because travel to and from China, who so generously gives new influenza strains every year to the rest of the world, wasn't happening. So chances are that predictions of a bad flu season this year simply won't be accurate. However, I could be wrong there.
Earlier this year, in June, I read Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker. Chapter by chapter it looks at various diseases like Ebola, toxic shock syndrome, Zika, and of course influenza. In fact, the chapter on influenza, which also outlines what could be a pandemic like the one in 1918, is eerily predictive of the Covid-19 outbreak. Different disease, that's all. This book came out in 2017, so it is up to date other than obviously they had no way of knowing what would actually happen this year.
I am hopeful that we will get a vaccine eventually. Hopeful, not certain. Until then, as you've said, the virus will continue to circulate and cause infection and death. If the death rate holds steady at 1%, that's potentially some 70 million deaths world wide. If no really effective and long-lasting vaccine can be developed, all bets are off.
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