What China managed to learn in Wuhan within a matter of weeks was that even a tight lockdown wasn't enough. R was still hovering around 1. Most of the transmi

What China managed to learn in Wuhan within a matter of weeks was that even a tight lockdown wasn't enough. R was still hovering around 1. Most of the transmission was happening inside homes. The solution was to to implement a central quarantine. If you tested positive, you were not sent home, you were sent to a quarantine facility to get better. This reduced R to about 0.3, and they were able to eradicate the virus in Wuhan. There have been fits and starts for this using empty hotel rooms, but nothing universal. In San Francisco, they offer hotel rooms to the homeless under the idea that they are more likely to catch the virus on the street, but they offer nothing to people who are actually confirmed to be infected. Those people go home and spread it to their family/roommates.