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.