“The Hammer and the Dance”. The endgame isn’t “no” new cases, just lowering the number of infections so the hospitals can handle it and so that contacts of cases can be ID’ed…
Say r0 of this thing is 3, meaning that each “generation” of the virus multiplies cases by a factor of three. Reducing contact by a factor of 10, wearing masks, etc will likely reduce the “fertility” of the virus to about 0.3, meaning that the number of cases will shrink exponentially in a similar period that it took them to grow. Politicians ordering people around also need to remember that between incubation period, showing symptoms, and testing, there’s a lag time of several weeks. New cases and hospitalizations will take 2 weeks to a month to start showing real declines.
But decline they will, almost as quickly as they grew. New cases will be a bell-shaped curve, though TOTAL people in hospital will still go up, since many people stay in hospital for a few weeks.
