The thinking behind that is that short of having a vaccine (18 mo off at best, probably) we are simply not capable of containing it, just slowing it down. Once

The thinking behind that is that short of having a vaccine (18 mo off at best, probably) we are simply not capable of containing it, just slowing it down. Once you you somewhere in that 40-70% range, it self contains due to lack of available hosts. Talking to people who study this stuff for a living, it's not an unreasonable assumption at this point. Plateauing during stringent isolation (if that is the case) isn't' evidence against this, I think. The big problem is that there still are not anything like good population estimates in the US, and unlikely to be since serious testing isn't done. Death and hospitalization statistics are better (but can get inaccurate if systems are overwhelmed) so the best the modelers can do is try and project from countries with better data ... inherently this is not as good as having good local data.