I hate to say it, but this might go on for years.
You don't hear much about herd immunity from COVID-19 these days. The available vaccines aren't bullet-proof against mild infection or contagion by the B.1.617.2 (delta) variant, which was first detected in India just nine months ago. About the only defenses we have against contagion of delta at present are masks and social distancing.
That's not to say that vaccination is useless against delta. It prevents serious illness among nearly all people, except those who are severely immuno-compromised or have another life-threatening condition. ("Nearly all" remains to be better defined by statistics. We should get better statistics in another two months or so.) Please, please encourage your unvaccinated family and friends to get the shots — and continue to fight against misinformation about the vaccines.
But as this article indicates, it's likely that new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus will continue to emerge around the world from time to time. Save the topic of how immoral it is that so few Africans are being vaccinated for another blog post someday. International travel isn't going to stop, so agencies like CDC and its counterparts in other countries will be challenged to identify, track, and manage the emergence and spread of these variants.
In short, don't be surprised if we see epsilon, zeta, and eta. They won't necessarily be more contagious or more deadly than delta, and they won't necessarily evade the original vaccines any better than delta does. But it's possible. And the economic and political reality is that it could take decades (plural!) to attain the success against COVID-19 that we've achieved worldwide for polio or smallpox.
Unless medical science can develop a vaccine that is effective across a wide range of coronaviruses or a treatment that reduces the mortality rate of any coronavirus infection to near zero, this threat to public health will be on our radar for the foreseeable future.
Chick-fil-A is tearing down relatively new restaurants to install multiple drive-through lanes despite the loss of indoor square footage. They're onto something.
