[cgbg]

There is going to be a very ugly “second wave” learning curve.

[cgbg]

Reasons any second wave will be nasty:

—Any country starts from a higher baseline of infected people (rather than 0) so the virus can spread in very large numbers very quickly.
—Because of the latency period and the lack of proactive testing in most countries, it will take a couple of weeks before the case numbers are shown to rise, and another week or two before the hospitalization rates start to rise.
—A month for this virus is _forever_, even if it only doubles once a week the hospitalization rate would explode before the country knew what hit them.
—Example—suppose a country currently has a 1% infection rate and it doubled each week. In a month the infection rate would be 8%.

[Thud]

Yup. You can tell people over and over this epidemic will last and come at us in multiple waves, but they will persist in believing that it's a "one and done" thing until the second wave has been going on for a while. Many will never get it.

"There is going to be a very ugly “second wave” learning curve."

This epidemic will last until almost everyone who can catch it does, or until it mutates into relative harmlessness (like the 1918 Spanish Flu did), or until most to almost all of us have been successfully vaccinated against it.