Poster seems to be thinking about the "UK approach" which is declared to be managing the situation until population immunity catches up and helps snuff it out.

But, since we're starting from zero natural immunity and a virulent disease with long hospitalizations, if you actually do the math here it never works - there's no situation where you can keep the number of infected low enough to not use up too many hospital beds and also high enough to get population immunity in any reasonable period of time. Those values simply don't overlap (which apparently someone has told the UK now, I guess).

The only viable approach is massive lockdowns to reduce the number of infected to a reasonable number followed by super-aggressive public health interventions for each and every infected person to control future spread.

You can't have a lockdown for more than a few months, otherwise the economy grinds to a halt and you get something akin to or worse than the great depression.

This virus will be with everyone for 18+ months, the point of the lockdown is allow the Health system to catch up

If you lock down early you irreparably harm the local economy and simply delay a spike instead of "flattening the curve" unless you are willing to except a year long lock down, massive economic depression and the colapse of the US Dollar

This is happening in my area right now. The number of cases is little to none, but the governor threw a blanket lock down on bars and restaurants, etc, over the whole state. It was too early for my area for sure. So in the meantime, businesses and people's livelihoods are already being destroyed.

The number of infected though is unknown because we haven't tested many people. When it is known then lock down on bars restaurants etc. will be too late.

I live in South Carolina https://www.scdhec.gov/monitoring-testing-covid-19. You are correct testing is still low, but I don't think that data is useless. I don't agree with the notion that it 'will be too late'.

As others have said, the point of a lock down should to prevent the hospitals from getting overwhelmed, prevent ventilator shortages, etc. Nobody even knows if a preemptive lock down can 'squash' the virus. While testing is being ramped up, aren't there other ways to determine outbreaks? Can't our leaders communicate with hospitals and find out number of open beds, ventilators, an influx of patients with suspected symptoms?

It is still going to be around once we come of of hiding, whenever that is, so it's possible we are just delaying the acceleration phase and we end up with the same result later instead of facing it now. I'm not saying there is never a time for a lock down, I just wonder if my local leaders panicked and did it to early, because they didn't know what else to do?

So in my area, the hospitals are fine. People are not flooding in the doors. Meanwhile thousands of jobs & businesses are being torched. My mom is a massage therapist, and is out of work for the foreseeable future. I just think there are smarter ways to go about it.

We could contact trace and quarantine like SK is now.

We should be doing that, but that is not what we are doing

We quarantine in indiscriminately with no tracing, very little testing

This has all the economic harm with no benefits that a proper quarantine would have