Covid-19 is here to stay. The world is working out how to live with it

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

YOU MAY BE exhausted but the covid-19 pandemic is barely getting started. Six months after Chinese scientists notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) of a new virus that caused deadly pneumonia, covid-19—as the disease was later dubbed—has spread to almost every country around the world and killed more than 500,000 people. In London, Madrid and New York deaths this year have been more than twice what they usually are in the same months. It took more than three months for global cases to reach a million; the last million came in less than a week.

Yet even in the countries with the worst outbreaks, just 5-15% of people have been infected. They may be immune to future infections, at least for a while, but with most of the population still susceptible, getting back to life as usual is impossible. The disease would again grow rapidly. Hospitals would soon be overwhelmed. A recent study published in the Lancet, a medical journal, estimates that about 4.5% of people infected...