[thymolu]

This has been my concern all along, that flattening the curve and whatnot is misleading without considering what happens at the end of distancing efforts. If you end up with the same exponential growth after inducing widespread costs from mitigation, it seems you're worse off.

On the other hand, at least where I'm at, politicians and policy makers have been explicit in saying the social distancing policies are about buying time: time to improve hospital readiness, time to develop quicker cheaper tests, time to develop antibody tests, and so forth. The benefits of this extra time have to be weighed against the costs ( which turn out to be counterintuitive based on empirical data ), but it's important.

The author acknowledges this and I don't think it's their point, which is to be clear about the effects of mitigation and therefore why you might or might not do it. But I think its also important to keep in mind a non-steady-state-based model time endpoint has justifications too.