A Miracle Treatment Would be Great, Right?

Maybe not.

Let's assume S. Korea's numbers are pretty realistic and that, with state of the art care available, the mortality rate is 1%. The matches what happened on the Grand Princess, too. That makes it 10 times more lethal than a typical flu.

Now suppose a month from now, we hit upon some combination of drugs that reduces the mortality and hospitalization rate by 70%. So then it's only three times as lethal as the flu, and only hospitalizes about three times as many as the flu.

So we would open the country back up, as soon as we had enough treatment to go around, right? That would be a disaster. In a typical flu season, 10% of the country gets it. That's because it's not a new virus, it's not very infectious, and we have vaccines for it.

None of that is true for Covid: there's no vaccine, nobody has any immunity, and it's infectious as hell. If we had the treatment like I described, and opened the country back up, you'd see at least half the population get it within a couple months. That's 150 million Americans getting something three times as bad as the flu. If just 1% of them need hospitilization, our system would be massive overwhelmed.

Until we get a vaccine, or some treatment that knocks the mortality rate down like 90+%, we can't relax our guard. It's too dangerous, it's extremely unlikely some miracle treatment knocks down the mortality rate more than, say, half, and it just spreads too fast. We're going to have to do what S. Korea is doing, which requires testing tens of millions of people and massive invasions of privacy.