The World Health Organization now says it will be 2022 before we can say we've reached the new world. Or at least that's what the WHO's Chief Scientist (a really cool title if there ever was one, straight out of a comic book) said.
"We are not going to achieve any levels of population immunity or herd immunity in 2021," said Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan on Monday. Why? No surprise: less developed countries will take longer to get access to enough vaccines; one in four people worldwide won't get the vaccine until 2022, and most of them will be in less-developed countries. Also large portions of the population will refuse/are refusing the vaccine, at least at first. And variants caused by genetic mutations may become more resistant to the vaccine. As we know, the virus hasn't learned about national (or even state!) borders yet, and probably never will. No one has herd immunity until everyone has herd immunity.
So: 2022.
We're going to Jupiter, not the asteroids. We can wave to the asteroids on the way by. Two years to Jupiter, if you don't want to slow down. If you want to slow down - maybe do a few lazy orbits, take some pictures from different angles, or actually land - well, more like six years.
So here we are, halfway to Jupiter, heading further out. If everything goes just right.
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