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SVM says:

Various therapeutics already exist, although the capacity of any of them to act as a “silver bullet” is still contested among experts.

As for the question of COVID-19 vaccines, it is very unlikely that any would be in widespread use by mid-2021. The timescale for implementing a newly developed vaccine is in the region of a decade, not a year, for the simple reason that any new vaccine *must* be assessed longitudinally for safety (because some adverse side-effects can take years to emerge, or become evident only during Phase III trials) before being made available to the general population. A brief perusal of the history of medicine shows that failure to wait for such longitudinal research to be completed could result in significantly more damage to public health than the disease being targeted.

If we are working on a paradigm that COVID-19 is so dangerous that its eradication takes precedence over all other health issues (including those which are exacerbated by lockdowns), then Doc Martin’s proposal that “we will still be in lockdown by 2022” is indeed a logical conclusion. If, conversely, we are working on the paradigm that COVID-19 is dangerous only to a reasonably identifiable subset of the population, and understand lockdowns as a means of keeping the rate of COVID-19 proliferation low (so that the health system can cope), then we could reopen society much sooner.

I fear that the present political discourse on COVID-19 lacks realism and candour about what the present restrictions on our liberty are likely to achieve when it comes to public health.