I’m no expert, but this is close to my assessment of the situation. One hope is that you open up a bit, and keep R0 low enough so that over 18 months it doesn’

I’m no expert, but this is close to my assessment of the situation. One hope is that you open up a bit, and keep R0 low enough so that over 18 months it doesn’t kill many people. Just have to keep R0 as close to 1 as you can. After some practice treating it as a control system, you could get quite good at it. This is where testing would fit it - feedback into your controller (which would be public policy). More generally it seems to me that historically herd immunity has always been the way out. By that argument, only something truly novel will help - only example I can think of is exploiting smartphones somehow to do contact tracing. That doesn’t mean it will work, just that it’s the only thing I can think of that hasn’t been tried before in this situation. If our assessment is correct, then China’s situation seems to be miraculous... either it’s a matter of time before we’re proven correct, or contact tracing + authoritarian state is enough. And then the question is, can that work in democratic countries?