Thing is this isn't necessarily world ending. We don't have a vaccine for a lot of really dangerous diseases.

The trouble is we need to actually build an infrastructure for mass testing and tracing and a lot of our leaders are dragging their asses at it. https://twitter.com/TheAgentNDN/status/1254176618601422849

But yeah this was always a possibility. Vaccines aren't things you can just conjure out of thin air if you have enough money. We'd have a vaccine for the common cold (also a coronavirus) if it was that easy. We'd have one for Ebola.

The really big problem that we're facing is that our medical system isn't designed to cope with a pandemic of this size and is poorly equipped to deal with the number of severe cases likely to occur at peak infection. That can change though, even without a vaccine.