During Trump’s meeting with pharmaceutical representatives on Monday, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned the public not to expect a quick vaccine. “He’s asking the question: When is it going to be deployable?” he said, referring to the president, “and that is going to be at the earliest a year to a year and a half.”

Certainly, therapeutics are critical in the long term, and at least a dozen pharma companies and biotech firms are working on developing a vaccine. Moderna has already shipped a potential vaccine to health officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which will begin clinical trials in April. Gilead Sciences has also launched clinical trials for a medicine called remdesivir that has been shown to be effective against coronaviruses in animal studies. In the short term, however, public health officials are focused on containing the new virus, not curing it.

Coronavirus, after all, is spreading rapidly. There are over 93,313 confirmed cases worldwide and 3,118 deaths as of this writing, with at least 108 cases in the U.S. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending minor precautions such as frequent hand washing and keeping hands away from your face. It also counsels that people who are feeling sick should stay home. Despite the CDC’s straightforward advice, some are taking more extreme measures to avoid contagion. Groups such as Mobile World Congress and the American Physical Society have canceled large conferences, and SXSW is facing pressure to do the same. While these cancellations may seem like an overreaction, avoiding large crowds where people shake hands is probably a good thing.

Expert opinion is divided on the efficacy of these interventions. “There is a lot of debate in the public health community as to actually how effective those kinds of social distancing interventions are,” says Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. He envisions two potential scenarios for how the disease will move next. The first is that the initial cases in the U.S. will stay relatively local and then come to a close fairly quickly. The other possibility is that as more health systems become able to test for the coronavirus, they’ll discover that COVID-19 has actually spread much more widely than previously thought. At that point, he says, health officials will start recommending social distancing, “which will cause a fair amount of turmoil, discomfort, and economic loss, as people are urged to become semi-hermits.”

Still, he says, there is evidence that these tactics buy time. “From a medical care perspective I would rather have the epidemic stretched out a bit, because then there won’t be quite as many people coming immediately to healthcare facilities and swamping them out,” Schaffner told me. Considering that there is yet no COVID-19 vaccine or “cure,” in Trump’s words, time is a crucial tool in managing public health.

Preparation is one of the best ways to mitigate future shocks to healthcare or economic systems. “Prepping gets a bad name,” says Aubree Gordon, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “It’s actually a social wide responsibility.” She says that it’s not a bad idea to prepare for spending two weeks to a month at home. Stocking up on food and medicines now means that the shelves will be stocked for people who, for whatever reason, were not able to do so earlier.