Comment Halt the exponential growth and then resume work (Score 1) 277
With aggressive contact tracing, when one person tests positive, we can find the 10-100 people that have the greatest risk of infection. These people can be quarantined, greatly reducing the probability of infection in the rest of the society. In this way, many activities can resume safely without exponential growth in cases. Of course, contact tracing may well be impossible if you have thousands of people sick in a single city, so you have to shut down a lot more for a few weeks, but eventually the growth in cases will slow to a trickle, and you can gradually resume work with the help of contact tracing.
Here in Shanghai, back in February very few people were allowed in the offices (mostly sysadmins), and everyone else have to work from home or stop working. In March office work is mostly back to normal and restaurants are also gradually reopening. Non-remote schooling still hasn't resumed though. In Taiwan they could even keep the schools open while having the disease largely in control. Of course, many activities (e.g. large gatherings) are still impossible, and even the Taiwanese people have to keep their borders shut for now. Life is quite a bit more boring (little non-online entertainment), uncomfortable (masks are mandatory in many places) and cumbersome (permits are needed to enter many residential and office areas, though the rules have relaxed somewhat) now, but much of the economy is now running.
So there is no need to despair. The economy may have to be largely paused for several weeks, but much can resume afterwards. Maybe we'll have better treatments some day, but currently the death rate of Covid-19 is over 1% in both Shanghai and Taiwan, even though both places can currently afford to do a lot of testing (not limited to serious cases) and give state-of-the-art treatments (plenty of oxygen, various potentially helpful drugs) to every patient; there may be many asymptomatic patients that go unnoticed, but according to the numbers (20%-60%) I've seen so far, they are probably not the vast majority. We just can't let a large proportion of the population get infected; that would mean the death of millions of people.