My current thoughts:
Hand washing, masks, and the "three C's" work. closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings. You also need limited travel with areas suffering an outbreak.
If you can convince the population to do all those things, and then do a lot of testing and contact tracing, you can lower the R0 of the virus significantly (average number of new people each person infects). If you do all these things as a society, then your number of new cases per day will stay basically flat instead of growing exponentially. If these countermeasures were put in place early (like Japan or New Zealand), or if they were implemented after a successful shelter in place (like China or South Korea), then a country can avoid ever having serious virus problems again.
If you don't do these things, the numbers will keep shooting up until your entire health system is overwhelmed and you have catastrophic video of people crowded into hospital beds in stadiums while a few harried nurses try to do what they can... Once the numbers get too high, the only thing to do is to "shelter in place" to bring it down. The number of confirmed tests will spike about two weeks after a shelter in place is implemented, ICU patients will spike about 4 weeks later, and deaths will spike 4-6 weeks later.
In Georgia, we spiked at about 750 cases a day. The shelter in place brought us down to about 400 cases a day, but it's climbing again. The current rate is about 650 a day and growing. The number of ICU patients has kept going down, but looks like it's bottomed out and is starting to rise again. Deaths will do the same soon, as these are lagging indicators. Most of the state thinks this is over and are not taking any precautions. With the protests, the numbers will start accelerating again.
If no vaccine were to be created, 80% of the population would get the virus. Communities that did lots of mitigation would take several years, while those that did little would get there quickly.
Of those infected, 50-80% would be assymptomatic. Of those with symptoms, between 0.2% and 3.4% would die. Run the numbers, and you're looking at over a million U.S. deaths. The longer this goes on, the more likely you are for the virus to mutate until there are multiple strains and it never completely dies out.
I'm low risk. So is my wife and my children. Most Americans are too. If our entire family got the virus, it's possible that none of us would show symptoms and we'd never know. if somebody had symptoms, they'd probably be mild. However, like everyone else, we have people we love that are high risk or extremely high risk. Left unchecked, we will all have loved ones die. I don't see much of a need to mitigate for my personal safety, but I'm going to do everything I can to slow the spread for my friends and family.
So, since we don't have a national unified leadership pushing hand washing, masks, and the three C's, what's next? Will there be a second shelter in place? It would be significantly more costly than the first. Businesses would fail, people would be economically ruined, and our governments wood be saddled with so much debt they couldn't recover. More than likely, we'd let things get as bad as we could stomach. Interestingly, most reporters would be too scared to want to go into coronavirus wards and the editors would be reluctant to publish too much that would "inflame" the population. And, our politicians would spread misinformation to try to look good. Meanwhile, the peaks in deaths are weeks after a shelter in place is started. In other words, we'd know things were bad, but the gutwrenching visuals would be delayed. We're months away from facing that crisis and we can ignore it in the meantime. ****, we could avoid ever having a crisis at all if we could just follow effective mitigation strategies...
So, since our people won't mitigate, what next? Our only real hope is a vaccine. Several governments including ours have spent billions manufacturing untested vaccines. Companies are rushing through testing, likely avoiding any strict oversight. At the end of this year, our government may tell all of us to receive one of these vaccines. It is easy to predict the whisper campaign... "It doesn't really work." "It has xxx awful side effects.". "It's not really a vaccine at all, it's xxx." But, once the vaccine gets out there, it'll slow the spread even if many people refuse to take it. And, ultimately, it'll be what gets this under control. Hopefully, the first generation of vaccines work. Otherwise, this could go into next Spring, or Summer, or who knows. Right now, I'm optimistic about vaccines.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-japan-tackled-coronavirus-without-a-lockdown-2020-5
