As I've said before, once you have a vaccine to work from, you can tweak it to counter new mutations; they do this with the flu vaccines all the time as new strains constantly develop.

I do agree COVID won't go away without a fight, but it's not a hopeless battle.

I like your rose tinted glasses. However I see more competition than cooperation, with different parties hacking into each others data to get ahead.

It is still rushed. You can't speed up testing for long term side effects. The big upside in this pandemic is that since people don't listen nor put the effort in to curb the spread, there is a huge test bed available to test the efficacy of vaccine candidates.

Anyway, what I see is capitalism, greed and stupidity working in favor of humanity for a change, to come to (hopefully) a quick resolution.

There's been a few hacks but we're still seeing scientists the world over sharing new discoveries and information on how to beat the virus. Capitalism is definitely at work, but at the end of the day the scientists and researchers involved are human beings who not only want to be safe themselves, but in most cases would want other people to be well also, especially their own friends and family.

Call me naive, but I think the majority of people the world over would want the suffering COVID is causing to end.

Long term adverse effects are quite unlikely, whereas we can say with almost complete certainty that if we hold off on vaccine development millions will die unnecessarily.

Today marks an important day for us here in Victoria; it's being called E-day, as after 28 days without new cases and with no active cases remaining, COVID has been declared eliminated from the state.

I am a bit nervous about our borders opening next Tuesday, as the state next to us recently had an outbreak, and while they reported no new cases today, it could still be out there in the community; we can only hope the contact tracing teams do a good job and shut it down. I really wish the state and federal leaders would commit to eradication and just stamp this thing out totally, we're so close to zero.

Don't mind my negative outlook, I just came off a week from playing GT Sport online again extensively (N24 was on). After so much online exposure you are destined to think humanity sucks lol, 99% of people are A holes!

Yes there has been a ton of cooperation and it's much in our interest to have competing vaccines instead of one big project, all working together on the same thing. One or two might fail, many more will succeed.

However the current 4+ million infections and 70 thousand deaths a week are mostly our own fault. We got an email today to prepare for new school closures. No clue what that means for online schooling. The online teachers still sit in the school (not allowed to teach from home for some reason) so we have no idea whether that continues or also stops.

The majority of people might want the suffering Covid causes to end, however too many people don't really want to do the necessary things to get there. I feel like most people are just waiting for a vaccine to make it go away.

Yeah I will admit this pandemic has really reminded me just how dumb and irresponsible a lot of the population is. As well as how many people I know who I thought were sensible are gullible enough to fall for ridiculous conspiracy theories. But this is nothing new I suppose, hysteria has gone hand-in-hand with almost every major plague in history.

Do you have some basic notion with mathematics ? Do you know that if you increase the amount of tests, you will push higher the graphics of cases/day ?

Cases which are for 80-90% asymptomatic person not even transmitter.

Here are the 2 waves in Sweden for DEATH this time, Sweden which has the weakest 2nd wave of Europe among every big western countries (>10 million).

Also the country which has the weakest restriction in Europe.

And now here is the country of western Europe who has the most intensive restriction of the continent (masks is mandatory EVERYWHERE except in your home)

But do not worry, you have elected Biden so soon you will know in USA the Italian restriction style. You have elected the COVID president.

Nice cherry picking there. Completely disregarding about 2/3 of European states, including Sweden's neighbours which did far better.

Btw. who are you to say that "big western countries" need to have a population of at least 10 million? I doubt any European would consider Sweden, Portugal, Belgium or Czechia as big

I said >10 millions to remove all the too small ones, Andorra for example has a very high death rate but it is only 1 town of 75000 people, just one cluster there makes explode the statistics. So this excludes Norway, Finland and Danemark which are in Europe the only 3 countries with better situation currently.

I have also said western, because the old soviet Europe is in different situation today, they had almost no 1st wave and are taking now a very intensive one, meanwhile in west there is a substantial higher level of herd immunity from their 1st wave.

pointless

Pointless ?? Who ever thought it was pointless.

We know 2 information sure at 100% about vaccine:

1) It is a way to multiply by ~50 the money, making it the most profitable industrial product of all time.

2) Labo who produce it are not responsible for the side effects.

Everybody who want the vaccine must know these two things.