I’ve been hearing:
1) We’re all gonna die.
2) Even if we had a vaccine it would be over a year before it was approved for public use.
These two ideas shouldn’t exist together comfortably, but they sometimes seem to.
There have been situations in the past where a vaccine made things worse rather than better. I believe that happened with a vaccine for dengue fever, where variants of the disease caused more severe reinfection in those that had been vaccinated.
So, some testing with animals and volunteers is in order, even if they think they have a good vaccine. That takes a while, unless they decide to gamble and just go ahead.
In the short term, I hope they find an antiviral which mitigates severe cases, even if it doesn’t prevent them. There have been rumors that the Chinese tried some antivirals that work for HIV. And I read there are some trials underway with several hundred patients using Gilead’s Remdesevir. Those are accelerated in comparison to the usual careful pace of development. But they aren’t here yet.