Also, don't forget it is viral disease which means those who have got already infected cant be cured!!
A vaccine is not effective on someone who is infected (or about to be infected). But it's going to take a long time to have a vaccine because vaccines are administered to healthy people so they must be very safe, so the fact that they don't help the currently infected isn't much of a concern.
I think it's much more likely that we'll have effective anti-viral and/or clonal antibody treatments long before effective vaccines. There are a half dozen trials ongoing now for various new and existing anti-viral compounds. Clonal antibody treatments don't even require any research breakthroughs, just the time it takes to isolate and clone cells that produce effective antibodies.
Both anti-virals and antibody treatments are used to treat sick people, so they don't have to be very safe-- they only have to be safer than the virus. If they're highly effective they only need to be slightly safer than the virus. Because they don't need to be very safe, we don't need to do much testing before widely deploying them.
If we find anti-viral treatments which are highly effective against sars-cov-2 and are fairly safe then in the developed world the issue will largely be resolved. You get symptoms... you visit a doctor and get an anti-viral shot (maybe even a pill, though rapid development might skip the restriction that compounds need to work orally). Done, no need for a disruptive response because people won't die, at least not in large numbers. (The situation in less developed parts of the world might not be quite so good). In the long run, a vaccine can eliminate the issue when one is finally ready (hopefully-- for some human coronaviruses immunity doesn't last very long).
Im just saying its impossible to open up business doors by April 12th !!
Places with larger numbers of infections and already straining hospitals like New York and California just won't. If other places do, in a week or two after they will see increasing hospitilizations, panic, and shut things down. Worse, because of the lag they'll continue to see increasing numbers after the shutdown and we'll potentially see even more panic, harsher lockdown mechanisms, etc.
In an exponential process the derivative is also an exponential... meaning that the more people are infected, the faster the rate of growth. Interventions like shutdowns and distancing temporarily change the exponent. An effective 'shutdown' must have a period of low contagion long enough to substantially lower the amount of infections in the population, or otherwise when you drop the shutdown you immediately jump to a tremendous infection rate when the original exponent is restored. Like "lasing a stick of dynamite". It certainly seems like in many places in the US where the infection started later people are taking shutdowns far less seriously then they are in (say) California-- instead of learning from earlier examples they look at them and say "well good thing its not so bad here, we can still go party", so it's quite plausible that there is still significant amounts of ongoing spread in these locations, many new infections, primed for an explosive outcome if there is a premature "all clear" sent by the whitehouse.
The only way an early back-to-work works out well is if some of the more fringe epidemiology theories circulating hold and that the virus really has a R0 of 23 and a very low hospitalization rate and in fact a huge number of people have already been infected. Existing data doesn't completely disprove this theory as far as I know but the growth rates of hospitalizations we've seen are pretty strong evidence against it. (If it were really the case that the virus was ludicrously infectious but just hospitalized very few people we would have seen the hospitalization rates spike much faster and everywhere almost at once). I think these sorts of high R0 low-hospitalization rate theories are just hopeful fantasy. There has been a lot of hopeful fantasy being thrown about by people who really don't want to face the reality-- this one is just a little less innumerate than most of them.
It's also absurd that a significant percentage of our testing capacity isn't being directed to sampling instead of obviously symptomatic people which would help us better understand and prepare for the spread and avoid making a costly mistake like prematurely reducing countermeasures (or keeping them around too long, for that matter).
Personally, I don't expect them the administration do anything that stupid-- though they might talk about it for the sake of encouraging hope. But then again, I also didn't expect them to respond so slowly to begin with...
I think it's really unfortunate that to prevent mask shortages the surgeon general and the CDC have materially mislead the public about the efficacy of masks. The obvious way to phase out shutdowns would be to massively manufacture masks (even just surgical masks) and make wearing them in public mandatory for everyone. There is significant evidence that population scale use of masks significantly lowers contagion for similar diseases and for sars-cov-2 in particular, and it would be a great way to reduce the unacceptable spike in additional hospitalizations a couple weeks after reducing distancing measures. In addition to the direct effect of reducing the spread, masks serve as a reminder of the risk (improving compliance with handwashing and distance keeping), discourage touching the face (for most people), and would be a visual identifier for idiots who are out without taking the pandemic seriously and whom should be avoided as a result. At this point, however, I think it would be politically impossible to go that route because it would require politicians to admit that they mislead the public, and it would require convincing the public to wear masks when many people now believe they don't work.
