Re: Coming to a Tin Pot Dictatorship near you soon.
"(If would-be-dictator Boris gets his way with two years' worth of Emergency Powers)."
The measures we are under will be around for a long time.
I have only thought of four ways out of suppression, none good.
1) The population is suppressed, sorry, the virus is suppressed long enough for herd immunity to develop. Suppression down to levels with enough ICU beds would be necessary. Since there are maximum 10k ICU beds, that's maximum 200k new infections a week. (5% needing ICU seems to be rough figures.) That's 10m people a year, so four years for probably enough. There should be a vaccine for it before then.
2) The virus is suppressed to low enough levels for people to think that it's worked. If it infects at about 10k/week now, and R0 is 0.5 in lockdown, then in two months you are getting roughly 40 infections a week. You probably won't find them, so you wave the mission complete flag, lift restrictions, and the virus goes back to R0 of 2.5. Probably closer to 3 now because of all the partying people will do. Within 5 weeks we are back to 10k/week, lockdown again.
3) Vaccine developed, tested, distributed, checked to have worked. 12-18 months.
4) So many people have died that maintaining suppression takes a back seat. I would say 100k deaths is enough to convince people that lockdown hasn't worked.