You left out a fourth option:
4. People exercise common sense and take precautions on their own initiative to minimize their risk.
You don't have to wait for the government to tell you what to do.
Yes, this was the oddest thing I noticed while shopping for necessaries. Every single place I went to was totally cleaned out of toilet paper. Other paper products were depleted but not completely out, but TP--nada. I don't get it.
At least in the US, I think it's too early to tell what the outcome of that option is.
We are not solving this through cleverness anymore, if it was ever on the table.
There are parents at my kids' schools rolling their eyes and planning playdates. The local ski hill closed and people are complaining falsely "it's less lethal than the flu". There are people filling bars all over the country.
It doesn't take all that many of these people to flood the hospital ICUs - which already run pretty full in normal times - well beyond capacity.
This is exacerbated by the political angle: once a huge, well-funded and entrenched propaganda system picked this up, it became inevitable that there’d be a lot of people who will take inordinate amounts of personal risk because they think doing so is somehow sticking it to liberals. The latest NBC poll showed a stark partisan divide on even basic personal safety measures:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/sixty-percen...
I like choosing lock-down to reduce no of wild cases to a small number followed by option 2. I believe that is what they are planning in Wuhan and China. They'll lift off the lock down gradually but will continue with aggressive monitoring/testing and tracing. This will bring back the economy while still keeping the risk of epidemic.
this implies 0.5% fatality rate. That's about an order of magnitude off.
Look at South Korea. Do you see a 5% CFR there? Of course not.
1. Go nuts and lock everything down, Wuhan-style. 2. Be really competent at testing people, tracking everyone they've come into contact with over the previous ~2 weeks, test them too, and recurse. South Korea/Singapore-style. 3. Accept that ~60% of your population will get the virus and take the ~million deaths.
Obviously 2 is the best choice to take, but in the absence of competent government, you will inevitably get overreaching government because reasonable precautions taken by mediocre government DOES NOT WORK!