I don't think a vaccine is the silver bullet people have been lead to believe it is. Even if it is, it's blindingly obvious that the world economy cannot wait for one to be developed, even allowing for the most optimistic timescales.

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How quickly should we want and expect those restrictions to be lifted?

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Did the UK ever introduce such restrictions?

Don‘t like to throw a wrench in that argumentation. Even with several handful different Corona virus types around since decades (several flu type Corona viruses and SARS, MERS, lots of animal bound Corona viruses) there was not a single successful vaccine developed for a Corona virus. Even the human body seems not to care to produce a lifetime immunity against any Corona type virus because this RNA viruses mutate in a year timeframe that immunity to that year old RNA would not help. The actual SARS-CoV2 virus interacts in a complex way with the human viral defense system a bit like HIV does.
So prepare to see a lot of bad news in the coming years about the attempts verifying the vaccine developments from the current 70+ companies and entities in Corona vaccine development.

I think we all need to be a bit cautious of announcements on vaccine developements, I fear most of these announcements have more to do with boosting American drug companies' stock market values than they do with real progress on a vaccine

The current lockdown procedures cannot go on forever or even much longer at all, The UK government is paying staff a proportion of their salary to stay at home, this can't continue for long and when it ends then what? What are people supposed to do for money and food.

We need people back at work, the damage we are creating is causing devastation to future lives for years and years to come , let's not forget our NHS will suffer for years from this due to the cuts that will have to come in and in tern cause higher deaths from diseases in the future

Whatever happens needs to happen fairly quickly to get stuff moving again, whilst maintaining social distancing

Two days ago the Australian federal minister for Tourism, someone who is known for “talking up” travel, said international travel in or out of Australia was unlikely before Christmas. He went on to add that no one should be booking cruises scheduled to depart this year, without a rock solid cancellation insurance. He concluded that the Cruise industry would be the very last in line to be permitted to reopen.

I agree with that but lifting the lockdown is a different issue to opening international borders for non-essential travel. I would have thought that even when borders are finally re-opened the restrictions and checks on entry are going to put off a lot of people from even attempting it in the short term.

An even bigger problem will be restrictions and checks on return. The holiday destinations will be desperate to open up as soon as possible.
David

If you got one engineer and tasked him to design the next supersonic transport, it would be all but impossible for him and perhaps take him 100 years or more.

If you assembled a team of 300 engineers, they could probably knock a design out in a year or two.

If you had fifty teams of 50 engineers they could probably have three or four designs in a month or two.

That's how the world's medical researchers are attacking this, en masse, at max continuous. We'll have a vaccine sooner rather than later .

We'll have several, but they will be untested. You can't short-circuit that testing.

No shortage of human volunteers to test it at the moment .....

Target fixation.

Are you seriously telling me you would rather take your chances with an untested vaccine than with the virus? (A vaccine is of no use to you once you are already ill).

AfricanSkies
Some vaccine development can indeed be done in parallel that is true. Multiple labs working on multiple potential vaccines certainly increases the chances of one of them working. You can also mass produce before you have finished testing, so you are ready to go the moment a particular vaccine tests successfully. However you do so in the knowledge that most of that effort will just be for nothing because the testing for most, if not all potentials will prove unsuccessful. (I suspect some people do not realise what the testing is for. It is not just to test whether the vaccine provides immunity. It also determines side effects, which can very easily outweigh the benefits). I personally think we would have to get very lucky indeed, to have a useful vaccine by September - it is not impossible as technical advancements in vaccine development and testing are bound to come with so many people focussed on it, but even so the chances are slim.

I’m an optimist too, and think we will see a vaccine earlier than the many years that are sometimes talked about. That said, there is only so much fast tracking you can do: I’m reminded of the famous quote about if it takes one woman nine months to make a baby, then nine women should be able to do it in a month...

There are probably things that came be done in parallel but also some that can’t, without some risky shortcuts in testing. If we are going to inoculate a significant percentage of the World’s population, which will have to happen for vaccination to be effective, then we’d want to be fairly sure about the lack of serious side effects and that takes time to establish.

FullWings, you beat me to it - I was thinking of the exact same '9 women can make a baby in one month' as I read AfricanSkies post.
As I previously noted, there are already vaccines undergoing human testing - creating the vaccine is not the time consuming part. It's the testing to make sure it works and isn't worse than the disease that takes time. That testing normally takes ~18 months. Skipping most of red tape and throwing unlimited resources can shorten that, but you're not going to turn months into weeks. Doing the job right takes time, and when you're talking millions of lives, you damn better make sure you get it right.

You have gone off thread. There will be a slow and different re-start to international air travel.

Most airlines are going to shut down. Sad, but true.

Indeed . As whole areas/continents have not yet started to be widely infected and do not have the same medical facilities and political resources to contain the infection . Nobody is going to travel voluntarily there for a long time ..

The hope is that countries that are at a comparable level and relax some domestic restrictions should be more comfortable reopening borders in a selective way, e.g. with visitors from other similarly safe places.

The OP argued for gradual, parity-based lifting of bans, which makes a lot of sense. This way, travel between lower-risk countries should not be prevented for much longer.