Look at the flu so called vaccine is 35% effective on average. Tons of viruses no vaccine has ever been created for, like HIV for instance. Herd immunity is the only realistic resolution.
Here is the yearly flu vaccine effectiveness from the CDC - It probably is closer to 40% effective than 35
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates.html
The reason flu vaccines have low effectiveness is that the flu virus mutates rapidly, in ways that enable it to maintain its virulence while evading antibodies to other strains.
The jury is still out on coronavirus, but so far it appears to mutate more slowly, and from what i've read most efforts to develop antibodies and vaccines are focused on its "spike" protein. It's widely believed, though far from certain at this time, that when the coronavirus mutates, it needs to retain the spike to gain access to cells, or the mutation will render it harmless. So it the hope is to develop countermeasures that are effective against all possible mutations that retain the spike.
Even so, it's not certain that having antibodies will prevent re-infection, though it's likely. It's also uncertain how long the protection will last.
On the other hand, if having antibodies does NOT provide protection, or if the coronavirus is able to mutate in ways that make antibodies / vaccines useless much like the influenza virus, then you can forget about herd immunity, too. If the virus mutates as rapidly as influenza while maintaining its virulence, thus rendering a vaccine ineffective... then there's no such thing as herd immunity, just as there's no herd immunity to the flu. That would be a really bad thing.
Bottom line - you can't have it both ways, expecting a vaccine to be as ineffective as the flu vaccine, while also hoping for herd immunity. There IS realistic hope that an effective vaccine is possible. And as someone else pointed out, effective treatments that reduce the mortality are also likely, and would make it a lot easier to get "back to normal" before the disease is entirely defeated.
95%+ of deaths are people with comorbiditys and the average age of death is 80. This virus is not a problem for the vast majority of the population. The ones at risk need to stay isolated, and eventually the virus will disappear. Very good chance that happens this summer.
You realize that a huge percentage of the U.S. population has one or more of those comorbidities, right?
1. Hypertension = high blood pressure.
45% of Americans have this.
2. Diabetes.
9.4% of Americans have this.
3. Hyperlipidemia = high cholesterol.
12% of American adults and 7% of children (!) have this.
4. Coronary artery disease.
6.7% of Americans have this.
5. Renal disease.
15% of American adults have chronic kidney disease.
6. Dementia.
1.6% of Americans (all ages) have dementia.
7. COPD.
4.9% of Americans have this.
8. Cancer.
9.4% of American adults have been diagnosed with cancer.
9. Atrial Fibrilation.
0.8-1.9% of Americans have this.
10. Heart failure.
805,000 Americans have a heart attack every year.
The fact that people who die are likely to have comorbidities does not mean that only sickly people die. The
vast majority of Americans has AT LEAST one of the above comorbidities.
And when you say, "The ones at risk need to stay isolated", perhaps you imagine just very old or sickly people. But what about everyone who takes care of elderly parents, or a sick relative? What about everyone who works at a nursing home? What about everyone who works in a factory or office in close proximity to someone like that? What about everyone who wants to be able to visit their grandparents?
In China they are back to complete normal, economy is completely up and going.
In China, as well as South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia, and a couple other countries, they actually followed the guidelines that we
should have followed in the U.S. They actually shut down and remained at home until they had extremely small numbers of daily new cases of COVID-19, combined with high levels of testing, so that they could quickly detect, trace contacts, and quarantine everyone likely to have been exposed. Exactly what we SAID we were going to do in this country, but mostly we were too lazy or impatient to follow through, so now our number of daily new cases and daily deaths remains close to its peak! There is absolutely no comparison between the situation in China and the current situation in the U.S.
Yesterday, there was ONE new case in China and New Zealand, 12 in South Korea, and 18 in Australia. There were 29,162 in the U.S.
That's a little misleading unless you know what percentage of the population is under 75 (94%) and what percentage has no comorbidities. If the percentage with no comorbidities is small, then 9% of all deaths is actually a significant percentage of that small intersection between people under 75 and people with no comorbidities.
Overall, 52.3% of deaths were people under 75.
There's nothing in these numbers that should be particularly reassuring to anyone but a small cohort of the population that's young, has no comorbidities, and doesn't ever come into close contact with people who are at higher risk (or perhaps a larger group, those who don't give a poo about people who are at higher risk).
the point still remains - the danger of this virus to the vast majority of the population is very low, while the danger of keeping the economy shut down is very very high.
It's true that keeping the economy shut down has very serious negative consequences, even in terms of lives lost. There
is a balance to be found between staying shut down and saving lives, vs. returning to normal and letting hospitals get overwhelmed and continuing to have 2000-3000 Americans die every day from COVID-19. Sadly, we half-assed the shutdown and are being premature in opening, so we're getting the worst of both worlds.
It was probably folly to ever think that the U.S. could really do the shutdown properly and get it completely over with in 2-3 months as some other countries have done successfully. Anyway, here we are. In most of the country, we're not going to get daily new cases down low enough to test, track, trace, and quarantine contacts.
Bottom line: your stats were way off / misleading, and it's way too soon to buy into your conclusion that "There is going to be a season, and most likely for a good portion of it, fans are going to be in the stands."
...dave