Curious, what's the end goal? And when does it end?

The short-term goal is limiting the case-load entering advanced medical care. The long-term goal is limiting the number of people who die from COVID-19.

When the number of active cases drops to zero, when basically everyone is tested and contact tracing has resolved all current active cases, when a large fraction of the population (25%-75%) already has had it, or when a vaccine or extremely good antiviral is developed and massively deployed.

I can't see any of these happening for months. To do any of them requires massive mobilization that isn't happening in the US.

Eventually COVID-19 will probably just be endemic like the seasonal flu. Hopefully it's also mutated by that point to be much less dangerous.

Alternatively, when a vaccine becomes available and we can establish herd immunity (for everyone but the anti-vaxxers of course).

Agreed, and specifically a vaccine will likely take much more than a few months so that's unlikely to be a short term fix

Hopefully not here (or there): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkel-coronavir...

The end goal is to mitigate and delay mass infection. It ends when the virus dies down and/or a vaccine is developed and mass produced.

So, a possibility of "never"?

The thing to focus on is that social distancing and other measures slow the growth rate of the infection, and will limit the peak load on our medical resources.

Once we run out of ventilators (and we will if we don't start canceling everything _right now_) the fatality rate will increase substantially.

Eventually pandemics burn themselves out -- the entire susceptible population becomes infected. At that point all the mitigation becomes pointless.

The goal of doing this is to lengthen the time it takes for that to happen so we don't overflow hospitals when ever gets it at once. It could be the difference between 500k people dying over 2 years and 4 million people dying in 6 months in the US.

It's likely that once the virus becomes endemic, it'll also be mutated to a less lethal form. Eventually, basically everyone will have had it and built up some level of (probably incomplete) immunity, so community gathering restrictions will no longer be needed to reduce load on hospitals.

As far as timeframe, probably 20-75% of the population will have had it by the end of the year. Certainly by 12 months from now. Or a vaccine or anti-viral will have been deployed.

"Never" what? You're aware that the world has had past pandemics, including one that killed 50 million people, and yet society returned to normal?

We also have influenza as an example of a possibility of "never."

Right, the flu will "never" be gone, but human society has been able to go about its business. That's why I wanted to know what the parent commenter means by "never". It seems like they were implying that society would be in a state of emergency forever because of coronavirus.

For some, a definite never. As lovers of life, we tend to feel the fewer the better. Will populations "never" normalize whatever comes to pass? Extremely doubtful, we seem incredibly adept at amnesicly moving on.