I am hopeful we can suppress this disease before herd immunity develops in cities. But, once that happens they stop acting like dense areas in terms of disease spread.
It’s really a question of regional R factors under various levels of social distancing, population, and herd imminuty.
I have a pet theory that what we're essentially doing is running a huge experiment where we select for the least dangerous strains of the coronavirus. People who get a mild flu or no symptoms at all are less well quarantined and are significantly more likely to pass it on to other people. People who get the worst symptoms are tightly quarantined in hospital, reducing their chances of passing on the worst forms of the virus.
It's probably not true and it isn't really based in any biological knowledge but it kind of makes sense in relation to what I've read about how the Spanish Flu epidemic ended.
That's exactly what happens. Diseases don't "want" to actually kill their hosts; it kills them too. If evolution was selecting for more dangerous variants over time, we'd all be long dead; multicellular life might not even be possible. But it's actually selecting for things that live in the host indefinitely and spread over long periods of time, which leave the host alive in order to do so.
In the long term, the coronavirus will very likely either be entirely eradicated by human action or become just another cold... but first you have to survive to see that long term.
This is also why the worst diseases you see are zoonoses, diseases that spread from other species. They are co-evolved (if you want the term for this, look up "coevolution") with their hosts, then they jump into us and do the things that they "think" will just lightly affect their hosts and let them spread, and we keel over dead because those are the wrong things.
Apparently, due to having its own proofreading mechanism, the virus is very stable genetically. I heard that over all the different strains that have been sequenced worldwide, the maximum difference is just 15 base pairs!
The Spanish flu was selected for extra virulence, because it started during a war and the sickest soldiers were sent back from the front to hospitals. Usually when people get sick, they isolate themselves, so the weakest forms spread.
It’s really a question of regional R factors under various levels of social distancing, population, and herd imminuty.