OK, I'll have a go.
Most Western countries will go through the peak level of hospitalisations and deaths over the next one to two months (maybe 3). Following this, sufficient numbers of people will have recovered from the illness (having had symptoms from nil to near death) and testing will be sufficiently available to demonstrate this. Only the vulnerable will need to maintain any level of isolation, despite the reduced level of infections, due to continuing risk to them if they did happen to get it. Death rates will be negligible in population terms, but the Press and citizenry will still report individual coronavirus tragedies, continuing to ignore the underlying population death rates.
Over the following 3 to 9 months (depending on country) most people will return to broadly normal life, although the very vulnerable will still be rightly nervous, and somewhat frustrated at being increasingly ignored. However, recovering capacity in health infrastructure and improved treatments will be encouraging for these people, with an increasing volume of recovery stories. Trump will be re-elected, as his hard-core supporters turn out in force to celebrate his strong leadership during the crisis, and Biden's campaign becomes lacklustre due to him being dead.
In much of the developing world, death rates will peak a bit later, due to lower rates of international and inter-regional travel, but will be worse due to less effective heath systems and infrastructure. But they will cope better, both emotionally and economically, due to an underlying higher mortality rate and more basic infrastructure disguising the impact somewhat. Population immunity will develop at about the same rate as in developed countries, and widespread testing will be rolled out by WHO, aid organisations and local healthcare systems.
Gradually, over the next 12 months, as death rates stabilise and the number of people who have recovered increases, there will a resumption of almost full normality including international travel. There will be a small economic boom world-wide as people spend more freely (using both government handouts and savings), as they come out of the period of restriction. Notably with older people, who have been hoarding wealth, now realising they need to live more actively. Governments will become concerned about the inflationary effect of their lax monetary policies during the crisis. The stock market will rise and the value of gold will drop like a stone, and not just because Wattie timed his shift into equities perfectly.
Social behaviours and working practices will generally return to normal, with people keen to get together in person again, frustrated by the inadequacies of 'distant socialising', video-conferencing and working from home. There will be no changes to the pay and conditions of 'beloved essential workers' like nurses and checkout clerks, but celebrities, footballers and CEOs will see a 10% rise in their earnings as usual. There will be no change in social attitudes or in care for the plant as almost everybody returns to their old ways. There will be a boom in both recruitment and conference attendance.
The Press will orchestrate a public witch-hunt about the handling of the crisis with the normal phases 3-6 of any incident like this: Hunt for the Guilty, Punish the Innocent and Reward the Uninvolved. Boris will be declared to be the saviour of the nation or public enemy number one, or possibly both.
Over the following years, the disease will remain something of a problem, adding about 2-10% to previous levels of global annual influenza/pneumonia deaths. Although there will be a fairly effective programme of vaccination for the vulnerable, plus a strong level of underlying immunity in the population. Consequently, winter deaths rates in the UK will increase from the previous average of 10,000 to 15,000 people per week to more like 11,000 to 17,000 per week.
After 2-3 years, serious scientific studies of the whole crisis will emerge which will be fairly contradictory, especially when wildly misinterpreted by the scientifically and statistically illiterate Press. We will start to look back on 2020 with embarrassment as we start to feel, rightly or wrongly, that we all got a bit overexcited about the whole thing.
ca.finance.yahoo.com
