Another reason why that synchronous 14 day lockdown would fail to eradicate the virus: unless you are going for total solitary confinement, intra-family transmission chains would be able to sustain the virus much, much longer than those 14 days. Even a household as small as a two child nuclear family could sustain the virus quite long if each infection happens to have a fan-out of one and happens rather late in the contagiousness window.

China did isolate infected people away from home for precisely this reason. Seems to have worked.

But that surely was only known positive isolation, not the blanket "everybody stay home" thing grandparent was suggesting. That's a huge difference particularly wrt (child)care: someone will take over until you are healthy again vs nobody can take over because everybody else is going through the same solitary confinement thing.

The big question is do they really work. Not according to country which measure traveller from china. We know in the long term. But trusting on their stat., not my default.

>if everyone did stay home for 14 days you may well eradicate the virus

This would not be possible. There are at least several species of animals (mikes, civets, and bats) than can transmit this virus. We would need to quarantine and test, or kill, each and every one of these animals to be sure we eliminate this virus, or else it will eventually make its way back to humans.

My opinion, based on what I read, is that this will be a bit of a scourge until such time as enough people have immunity from either catching it or getting vaccinated.

Over time, as this new coronavirus makes its way through the human population, the experts it to become less virulent in general and/or appear less often. [0]

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...

Also, cats and dogs can catch Covid-19. We think it's rare, but it is documented.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...

Latest headline I saw, didn’t read because I didn’t want to be depressed, was that asymptomatic carriers were shedding the virus for months.