It bears repeating, over and over: The point of coronavirus testing and isolation is not that health professionals believe the virus can be contained. It has spread all over the world, and is likely to be with us for some time. The point of testing and isolation is to slow transmission of the disease as much as possible, so that hospitals are not overwhelmed with more patients than can possibly be treated.
The American healthcare system is run with an eye toward minimizing expenses and maximizing profits. That means as few spare beds as possible because every empty bed, every doctor, nurse and specialist who has an idle 10 minutes to spare costs money. The system is designed to run lean. It is not built to handle a national catastrophe; that is what makes them catastrophes.
Here's a good new example of The Chart.
The sharp purple peak is what a completely uncontained national epidemic might look like, in terms of cases requiring hospitalization. The orange mesa is the amount of hospital beds available, and those that might theoretically be made available, in some fashion, in coming weeks. As is immediately obvious, the no-confinement epidemic produces far, far more simultaneous cases than U.S. healthcare facilities can possibly provide. Those people either don't get treated or get treated in whatever cobbled-together manner can be mustered, but for various reasons, "don't get treated" is the more likely assumption.
Why is that? Here's a fairly detailed rundown from Jonathan Cohn. There aren't enough ventilators for those patients—about 160,000, total—and there are not going to be more any time soon. There won't be enough masks to protect care workers. There won't be enough of other basic supplies.
Most critical, by far: There won't be enough workers. You can have all the masks and ventilators you want, but if there aren't healthcare workers to operate them, or if healthcare workers are themselves having to leave the frontlines in large numbers because they themselves are sick, those supplies won't do any good.
Now compare the shallower, wider green hill in the animation above: That represents the same number of patients as the sharp purple peak, but spread out over a much longer period of time. Because the buildup of patients is slower, the system has more time to prepare. Because there are far fewer simultaneous cases, there are beds for them all, if just barely. Everyone gets treated. The same number of people end up getting sick, but far fewer of them would be expected to die.
This is the whole point of current "self-quarantine" and "social distancing" measures, and the point of canceling large events in places with confirmed coronavirus cases. The expectation is not that the cancellation of large conferences and festivals will truly stop the virus' spread; individuals who are infected with the virus but don't know it will still likely go about their daily lives, sneezing and coughing and obligingly scattering the virus to new hosts. That is how viruses work. But by infecting fewer people, at a slower pace, the demand for medical services is itself slowed.
This is also why public health experts have been so very alarmed at the Trump administration’s early-stages bungling, and especially at the continued unavailability or rationing of testing kits for the new coronavirus strain. When the disease reached epidemic levels in Wuhan, China, the government closed borders and instituted aggressive containment measures intended to block the epidemic from reaching farther, faster; that time was necessary to give China and all other countries more time to prepare for the virus' likely expansion. That was the point at which the United States was supposed to be ramping up testing (but the early tests were botched), breaking out the emergency plans for a pandemic (but Trump dissolved the national security team tasked with coordinating such plans), and making sure state and local governments were up to speed on what was going on.
Instead, U.S. officials hesitated to make preparations for fear it would give Donald Trump the Angries. Trump himself contradicted officials who did make public statements, allegedly getting angry because he did not want the stock markets to go down in response. The net result is that the nation squandered weeks of preparedness time and we still, even today, have very little information about how the virus is spreading.
That makes what happens next much more difficult. We are on the path of the sharp purple peak in the above graph. To bend it back down to a non-catastrophic curve, it will be necessary to go much further in our national efforts to slow the disease than we otherwise would. We're going to have to cancel more events, in more places. We're going to have to ask Americans to "self-quarantine" themselves to a greater extent. The potential for economic disruption has now risen sharply because of those initial delays.
What, then, should we do? What everyone has already been suggesting, of course, but more of it. Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Duck out on any social gatherings you feel you can, especially ones with larger crowds or that pull in people from other cities or states. Look through your house to verify that you have the supplies to get you through a 14-day run of staying home or a longer run of being sick with flu-like symptoms and generally miserable.
Other than that? We'll just have to wait and see. We'll know more about what comes next when the testing shortages are resolved, and we see whether the virus is still relatively isolated or has already jumped initial containment efforts during the long period in which people weren't getting tested.