Hm. Doesn’t the paper go on to say that full lockdowns would need to be in effect for 2⁄3 of those 18 months? I will read that article, but I don’t think the paper is saying that we could return to normal with monitoring and case tracing and localized lockdown to quash outbreaks for the remainder of the 18 months.
e: Okay, read the paper. Respectfully, many of the estimated numbers there seem entirely inconsistent with the literature that I’ve been reading from epidemiology experts. I haven’t seen a single paper estimating 10 million deaths in the United States, and I’m not inclined to trust an uncredentialed medium post (I know this is relevant to the OP topic).
I also really value modeling. Ferguson ran the numbers and seems to suggest that “the dance” would not be an effective approach for suppression long term and that we would need to go under frequent shelter-in-places again. This medium article doesn’t seem to cite any sort of number crunching that the hammer followed by the dance would work for long-term suppression.
Yep, I meant it in the correct fashion :) Prescribe would imply the opposite of what the paper said.