The article doesn't say we are all going to be shut in for he next 12-18 months, it just says life is going to be different for a while. Once the number of cas

The article doesn't say we are all going to be shut in for he next 12-18 months, it just says life is going to be different for a while. Once the number of cases is dropped down to a manageable level again, which for many states in the US is projected to be somewhere from the end of April to the end of June, we can open things up a bit provided we have a strategy for extensive testing, following exposures and isolating people that test positive. Yes that will still be significantly different than our previous lives, but for many people it will be much closer to how things were before. The key is we need to continue to ramp up testing and we need a system in place for authorities to randomly test healthy people so that they can monitor the extent of the outbreak before it turns into hundreds or thousands of deaths a day again. So the average person will be able to go to work, socialize and more or less return to life as normal but they may have to submit to a nasal swab once in a while on the way into the grocery store or something like that. It doesn't seem like a terrible trade-off.