So what is the real goal here in terms of prevention - to have people stay home unless you have to leave your house (i.e. work, groceries, food) until a vaccine is discovered? And by all accounts a vaccine will not be discovered and distributed for a good 12-18 months.
And for those thinking that sports will only be shut down for a month or two - or schools will only be shut down for a couple weeks - why? What is the thresh hold where all of a sudden people will be at ease with going on with life? Because the numbers are only going to go up as more testing is done even if we are being extra careful. And if numbers are going up - or even if they are leveling off - why will people be more at ease - because the virus will still be out there without a vaccine.
The goal is to slow down the spread so that a graph of the spread over time looks less like a hockey stick, and that the hope of containing the disease looks less like a game of Whack-A-Mole. In so doing, that will (hopefully) prevent local and regional health services (i.e. hospitals and clinics) from being overwhelmed, trained health care professionals from being themselves infected and becoming victims*, and generally prevent (hopefully) the need to enact stricter lockdown or quarantine protocols.
And no doubt, one of the things epidemiologists and other health care professionals are concerned about is the notion that just one or two people infected come into a "clean" place like a Seattle nursing home or a Boston biomedical meeting or a DC political action conference or a New York synagogue and suddenly within a few days or so you have dozens if not hundreds of confirmed cases and/or positive tests. Now project that onto an area like...oh, let's just pull a random not-related-at-all-to-the-initial topic-of-the-thread location out of a hat...the Bangor, Maine MSA. What's the number of virus-related cases an MSA of about 150,000 can handle without significantly disrupting their ability to handle the baseline level of health situations that DON'T STOP HAPPENING just because there's a new virus out there? What kind of ability will there be for an outbreak to be contained just to the Bangor area without just one person slipping past and, let's just pick another entirely unrelated location out of a hat, getting to St. Paul MN or Montreal QC or Bujedovice in the Czech Republic and doing the exact same thing as what happened in Cambridge, or Kirkland, or New Rochelle?
So essentially what they want to happen is to get the spread of cases leveled off, to avoid creating new disease hotspots, to hopefully keep any disruptions to public life and citizen freedom localized to existing hotspots, and allowing the disease to "burn itself out" to the degree possible so that it doesn't overwhelm local and regional health services in the 12-18 months it will take us to get a vaccine.
*One of the most significant factors in disease outbreaks turning from nuisance to civilization-destroyers.
I meant what is the best realistic way we try to prevent the spread. Do we just become homebodies for 12-18 months?
I just cant fathom that's realistic
The "good" news on that front is that it doesn't take much more than a couple of weeks for a person to go from "infected" to "no longer infected" (whether that means because they died or because they beat the virus). So theoretically, if EVERY one of the current thousand plus confirmed positive cases (and every one of the ones we don't know about) is kept away from infecting new people for a couple-three weeks and disease transmission afterwards is kept to a minimum (and not asymptotically exploding like it is now) while the vaccine is created, disruptions to regular living should only be about a month, and if we're lucky, won't really involve having to stay in place for any extended length of time if we aren't personally infected and/or symptomatic.
But that's assuming any current or immediate-future mitigation attempts are successful and/or timely at slowing the rate of infection.
