From reading the news and talking to people I get the sense that we think this is a short-term phenomenon, and that a rapid-aggressive-response strategy of the type we have currently deployed, will see us through and then life can go back to normal.

I worry that this is not going to be the case that we have to be prepared for a slow-burn evolution of this epidemic and that the more aggressive the current response the slower the burn because it will "flatten the curve" but may not do much to change the total area under it.

The flatter curve is therefore not an end in itself but merely the means to allow us to have more time to "raise the line", i.e., prepare ourselves to mount a much more segmented/focused testing, treatment, isolation, response which we can sustain for a long period of time.

However, preparing ourselves "doesn’t just mean more masks, beds, ventilators, or medicines for the 20 percent of cases expected to require hospitalisation" but to increase the capacity of the overall system (public and private) across the country. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/7/21201260/coronavirus-usa-chart-mask-shortage-ventilators-flatten-the-curve

For example, there are close to a million primary care providers and over 2 million NGOs in India. They need to be given better training and guidance on how to care for their communities. Simply asking them to refer to centralised facilities does not "raise the line".

There is no way we can test everybody and entirely eliminate the risk, but we nevertheless need to be aware of the burden of disease in the entire country. Segmenting the country, randomly selecting people to test, and doing pooled testing will, for example, allow us to do this.