Full scale production by the end of 2021 assuming this untested candidate turns out to be effective.
As with all of the information being discussed, it's important to keep context around announcements like that. This is a vaccine candidate. They haven't even begun human testing, and hope to by September 2020. If the candidate is effective, they hope to begin production a year from now with full production on line by the end of 2021.
This is in line with other vaccines undergoing trials. Moderna has one in human trials that, if successful, they don't expect to be available for 18 months.
The word that people seem to keep omitting is "eventually". If there's incentive to stop this it may be stopped eventually. That said, there are other diseases we appear incentivized to stop and we aren't doing a great job of it. How many years have we been looking for an HIV vaccine? I also expect, but don't know for sure, that we'll find a solution eventually.
Hopefully by 2022 I'll be able to get a Covid-19 shot in my right arm at the same time I get a flu shot in my left.
Now, back from the future:
Bad analogies don't give perspective to bad math. If the numbers people are using aren't based on supportable scientific models (and there are many, many experts in this field working to build supportable models) then those numbers are meaningless at best. Likewise, if numbers are based on a completely different disease, those numbers are meaningless at best.
A bad analogy is also destructive (because it gives people the incorrect impression that something new is actually familiar) and stupid (because the science simply doesn't transfer over).
The models that are used aren't simple chained multiplies, by the way. The infection rate and mortality rates are themselves based on models of varying sophistication. As one example of how the human interactions figure in, look here:
And, critically, mortality models account for health care capacity which is why there's not a simple sliding scale between a controlled outbreak and an uncontrolled outbreak-- there's essentially two different scenarios: within our capacity, and beyond our capacity and the anticipated outcomes for those two scenarios are strikingly different.
If, when the dust settles, the only information I have is that the 61,000 Americans died of Covid-19, I can't draw much of a conclusion at all. To really understand the danger of the disease and the impact our countermeasures had, we'll need to evaluate the models we've been using, see how well they matched the actual spread and health impacts of the disease with and without various social control mechanisms and from that data determine whether we did enough, too much, or too little. Over time we'll get better comparative data across regions, demographics, and policy approaches.
That information will come after the fact. For now, we work from the best available data and I have yet to hear a respected expert say we should model our response on the 2018 flu.
You've made two baseless assertions entirely in your own head and then present them as evidence for a conclusion that has more free variables than the two you just laid out.
Some of the blowback you're getting may be because most of the "it's just like the flu" arguments are intended to downplay the current risks-- so if you're confused why people don't understand that you want harsher controls even though you think it's just another flu, you might want to flesh out your argument a bit more so people see the nuance you're trying to provide.
It also sounds a bit like you consider 61,000 an "acceptable loss", which some people may take offense to.
My confusion though is that you seem to be saying that the social distancing guidelines aren't helpful (if the death toll is flu level then others will say it was because distancing worked), or even important (because only a flu-load of people would probably die), but we should make them stronger and more invasive.
Saying this is going to be like the 2018 flu is speculating and projecting the future but doing so in a way that no infectious disease expert thinks is supportable. To me, that's far more logically stupid than working from models based on the current disease.
Even when we talk about the flu each year, we don't assume it will be the same as the previous year-- we model its unique behavior each year as it moves from country to country. So comparing two completely different viruses is completely baseless.
