You don't need hand sanitizers. You need general quarantine. Close everything. Stay at home. That's what helped in China. Italy introduced western version of it week ago, it's still too soon to tell if it helped, we will know in another week. If it's not enough, we will have to right out ban people from leaving their houses, and enforce it, just as China did. Italy is week deep in healthcare collapse. What will come next week when there is 10 times more cases there ? Most other European countries are not learning a bit. They are all waiting for the situation to get bad. And US is following the trend. General quarantine with first case in the country, or even sooner. That's the best step. And let's hope some non-totalitarian version can be found which works.
The problem is that quarantine is not a cure. When you come out of quarantine you remain susceptible. At this point we are not going to eradicate the virus. So you come out and get infected. You have delayed the infection not prevented it. So why delay?
If you do it right you can smear the peak, preventing health services being overloaded. If you do it wrong for us in the North, you push the peak into autumn and you then have it merging into the winter surge in respiratory infections and make things worse. Ideally you want to smear the peak so it is winding down in September.
In theory if you knew a cure or vaccine was coming soon this would justify a quarantine until help arrived. Even the imminent discovery in vitro means months of accelerated human testing then the need to make billions of doses. This is not going to happen before the Northern winter.
So the question is are you best to allow a 'controlled burn' now? Or try to keep a lock down quarantine until a cure / vaccine is available in months, with the devastation of the economy that would mean? Is that even possible? Will people put up with being locked in with their children for months with twice weekly exits for food shopping, and only essential workers allowed to travel for work? The UK is potentially asking over 70's to self isolate for 3 months. This is the length of lock down potentially needed and might just delay the peak not spread it.
From a purely pragmatic PoV it may be the best and most practical response to allow the epidemic to progress but slow it by social distancing and social isolation for anyone with a flu like illness. Spread the peak, but have it passing before winter.
The predicted peak was about 50% of illness occurring over 3 weeks, if the peak could be spread to 9 weeks then this is a three fold reduction in the rate of admission to hospital and demand for beds.
ETA To have an impact school closures need to be for 3 - 4 months. As Covid 19 is not significantly affecting children unlike e.g. flu the benefit of school closures is not great.
I had wondered about geographic cycling of quarantine, so you geographically smeared the peak, allowing the peak to occur at different times in different cities. This then requires a non-country wide but local policy and mutual assistance between areas that are less and more severely affected.
