The idea is that we slow the train down for a couple reasons. The top level reason is to preserve the capacity of the health care system to care for people who get sick. But the other is if we bend the curve and are able to reduce the case count then we can go back to more refined containment strategies and marry those with the mitigation.

With more testing available, can the shelter-in-place orders be lifted and as soon as an outbreak is identified, a rush to contain it? Are you hoping that’s what comes next?

That’s exactly right. We started out with containment, we are now in very broad-based mitigation.

Eventually if we slow it down enough, when we put together more resources and the numbers are less than 1,000, then we could do some more of the individual case investigations, rapid isolation, and that would be another way to slow things down.

All of this we’re doing while there’s a race to develop a vaccine.

But we don’t know if a vaccine will come or not. We’ve had mixed results with previous coronaviruses.

That’s right.

There’s this paradox that the better you are at managing the first wave of the virus, the more vulnerable you are to the second wave because you have so many people who are not immune. Is there a fear for the second wave, that the initial success will not lead to any permanent solution short of a vaccine?

My hope, and I’m generally an optimistic person, is that if we had just a few more tools at the ready we could focus our resources in a more precise way.

For example, if we had antibody tests, if we could stand on that, then we would do a much better job with health care workers.