Only if coupled with a public health program that does something. We might reach the ring vaccination stage, where each case triggers contact tracing and testing and vaccination of all contacts and the people around them. That's how smallpox was wiped out.
> Only if coupled with a public health program that does something
Isn't that what this whole Massachusetts thing a step towards? But my point is that the public health program can't really do something when there's thousands of cases, but the lower case count means this can be effective once more.
As far as I can tell, you can't ring vaccinate for this. 1) SARS-CoV-2 vaccines don't work after exposure. 2) You don't have exceedingly obvious symptoms when you become infectious. 3) IFR is not that high for most people, and if they care about that they are already vaccinated. Smallpox is very different in all of those metrics, making ring vaccination possible. Pulse vaccination might work better, but only with vaccines that majorly reduce transmission for quite a long time (BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, probably NovaVax), it's possible you would have to pulse J&J too often to be practical. Hopefully the original antigenic sin issue won't be so bad that re-targeting antibodies is not effective in most people, otherwise giving up on transmission control and trying to reduce deaths might be the only option, if new strains arise.
