Clark
That’s all very well and good but that train has already left the station long ago. If ever we were going to stamp out an epidemic or a pandemic you do it in the beginning with stringent measures and with honesty and with consensus and trust. None of this is going to happen here, so Professor Altman is just being realistic and vaccination seems the only way out. One of the factors that is a feature of all or most of the vaccines is that they can be tweaked to reflect any virus mutation causing escape from antibodies. Anyway immunity is notable absolute yes or no but some background immunity will be there to reduce the disease severity.
There are other developments too. Mortality after hospital admission is almost half of what it was at the beginning, as hospitals and doctors begin to understand the disease better. I am afraid it is too late to rely on isolation and masks and so on, especially in a country that cannot even control its borders properly when it should and which fails to have a functional test and trace system.