The last pandemic, swine flu, was officially declared as one in January 2009, and officially declared over in August 2010. So that’s 20 months in total, give or take.
Before you start thinking that there are only so many things to watch on Netflix, it’s worthwhile remembering that there was a considerable drop-off in the number of new cases from about April 2010, so the WHO is probably going to be similarly conservative in declaring the end of the coronavirus pandemic as it was with that. As, indeed, it was in declaring the start of the pandemic, which smelled a bit “pandemicy” from January or February, but was only declared one a few weeks ago.
OK, so you’re still thinking “I’m going to be stuck at home for that long????” The answer is probably not.
In most countries which have imposed movement restrictions, there’s a wide range of those, and I suspect that some (certainly not all) will be lifted once things start to get better in that location.
Remember, the idea is that you don’t want your healthcare system to be overwhelmed with new cases. A few here and there (or, in a larger country, a bit more than that) is manageable in most countries. What you don’t want is thousands per day, since that pretty quickly leads to roughly that number of deaths per day.
So when that infection rate looks to have dropped sustainably to something lower, I fully expect some restrictions to be lifted. Gatherings may not be limited to two people, for example, or cinemas may be allowed to open on a limited basis, or something like that. So long as things don’t kick off again, maybe some more restrictions will get lifted. If they do, there might be a quick reimposition of things.
All of this, too, gets us closer to the point where a vaccine will be available. Once that’s sufficiently out there in the general population, restrictions can be lifted on a more lasting basis.
But the key here is that everyone needs to pull together. It takes somewhere between 2–3 weeks for a new restriction to show any effects in the statistics, and to begin with that impact is really small. The trick is not to look at that and say “Well, that’s not working. I’ll go back to how things normally were”. You keep it up for a bit longer, and the effect is more visible. And more again, and so on. The better that everyone gets at doing this, the faster the effects are seen. The faster the effects are seen, the faster things get back to normal.
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