One lesson becoming clear from the Covid experience is that there’s a limit to how long people are willing to live under pandemic rules, and that limit is about two years.

In the first few weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a real hope that with sufficient lockdowns, contact tracing, and social distancing measures we might be able to quash the virus to the point where there would only be isolated cases. There was even good reason to think we could eradicate it completely, the way we quickly eliminated the original SARS virus and MERS a few years later.

A year and a half later, with continuing waves of outbreaks despite widespread vaccination in developed countries, it’s fair to say that the window has closed for bringing COVID-19 under control. In hindsight, it now seems like we may never have had a real opportunity to keep the disease from spreading globally.

This is purely an educated layperson’s half-baked theory, and people much smarter than me with more expertise in epidemiology might instantly spot some obvious reason why what I’m about to write is completely and utterly wrong. But with that disclaimer out of the way…

I think there’s a strong chance that Israel reached COVID herd immunity around the first week of March.

What’s more, if that’s true then there’s some useful insights we can probably gain about the course of the pandemic here in the United States over the next few months.