Is Coronavirus Getting Out of the Box? How Long Before a Vaccine?

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

The pandemic clock is ticking on the Coronavirus. For several weeks now, all the king’s horses and men of international cooperation have managed to keep the virus more or less confined to a regional outbreak.

China has taken most of the hit, with only a few other cases scattered around the world. Now, the number of cases in locations outside China is slowly building. It’s like a spark that becomes a blaze and then, if the winds change, can become an all-out wildfire that won’t be stopped until it’s done its worst.

Clearly, all the king’s men and all the king’s horses cannot contain the Coronavirus indefinitely. It is in the process of breaking out of the box they’ve built for it as I type this.

But one thing can stop it.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

We are waiting for that one thing, which is a vaccine. It takes time to develop a vaccine, especially against a virus. Then, it takes even more time to ramp up industrial scale production of that vaccine and get it out to millions of people around the globe.

But the virus will back down in front of a vaccine. It will lose its killing power one immune person at a time.

So this is a race, not of horses, but of a few committed individuals and our industrial base against the geometric killing power of a microscopic bit of half-alive-half-not-alive life called a virus.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

We’re waiting for a vaccine.

From the New York Times:

Rapidly expanding outbreaks in South Korea, Iran and Italy, following those in China and Japan, are raising fears of a pandemic on multiple continents.

RIGHT NOW

The number of people infected in the United States has jumped to 53, from 34 on Friday, the C.D.C. says.