Yeah that's the goal, and you do need a tight lockdown to reach it, but only for a short time (4-8 weeks) if everyone commits to it. That's really not too big

Yeah that's the goal, and you do need a tight lockdown to reach it, but only for a short time (4-8 weeks) if everyone commits to it. That's really not too big a sacrifice to ask to kill an epidemic. It's also clearly direly needed practice for the next, worst epidemic. We got lucky with COVID-19, it's on the mild side of the scale. In a worse case scenario, say Ebola mutates to an airborne strain, the countries and cities that essentially used COVID-19 as a practice run to develop the procedures and social knowledge to quickly shut down an epidemic, will be looking smart. We've known for decades that pandemics are coming, as the world becomes more physically connected. We've written tons of books and made tons of movies about it. Every zombie movie of the past 20yrs is about a viral outbreak. So it's insane that so many Western countries are behaving like idiot children in the face of this entirely predictable and predicted problem.