Social distancing has been proven to work. If we can keep this up until June, the rate of infections will fall. While we're doing that, we have to build up our armory, so to speak. Isolate the infected, scale contact tracing, increasing testing to where 750k-million can get tested a week, increase ICU/Vents/PPE/Masks, increase health care workforce.
Now, if we can see consistent reduction in cases, if hospitals aren't being overrun, and active testing/monitoring of cases is being done, we can move from population wide lockdown to case by case mitigation. Its the difference between locking down the entire forest because of a raging fire everywhere to opening it up and putting out specific fires when they pop up. Schools, businesses can open up. A sense of normalcy can resume. Social Gatherings are still limited. Mask wearing and hand washing are still encouraged, if not legally enforced. Mass testing and tracing is still being done. And if cases shoot back up, be ready to go back to lockdown if need be. Meanwhile work on drugs/treatments/therapies/vaccines keep going.
It'll probably be a combination of these two until a safe vaccine is produced and distributed. We won't, and *can't*, stay inside our houses for 18+ months. Not even experts like Dr. Fauci think that's remotely possible. But its gonna take a huge amount of coordination at the state and federal level to control future spread:
- Better data to identify areas of spread and the rate of exposure and immunity in the population;
- Improvements in state and local health care system capabilities, public-health infrastructure for early outbreak identification, case containment, and adequate medical supplies; and
- Therapeutic, prophylactic, and preventive treatments and better-informed medical interventions that give us the tools to protect the most vulnerable people and help rescue those who may become very sick.
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb laid out a detailed plan in four phases in how we're gonna beat this. I have no use for rosy naive Conservative optimism("It'll just go away in June and everybody will forget about it!"), but hopeless cynicism("We're all on lockdown for 18-24 months, we're all fucked, society is over") is equally pointless. This month of April is gonna be the worst of it. With the increase in tools, supplies, testing, tracing, social isolation tactics, and possible treatments in the coming months, we will never be caught so under prepared like this again. Stay strong, stay informed, and stay positive. This is not the flu but its not the end of life as we know it. Its a war and we can win it with the right strategies.