Aftermath of the virus

A dilemma that we will face after the virus subsides is an analysis of what worked and what didn't. As far as I can tell, there is very little science on which measures are worth doing to fight the spread of viruses.
On a practical level, various cities, states, and countries have done various things, gradually tending toward more austere acts like stay-at-home orders. Even if we did nothing, there will be an increase to a certain point, a leveling off, then a decline and disappearance of the infections.
Things are compounded by the range of illness that victims express, death at one end, but apparently little or no symptoms on the mild end.
Even now, the estimated number of cases is a fuzzy number, the only question being how many times that number is the real number of infections. We can presume that the number of deaths is more accurate, and there might even be some tendency to overestimate death strictly due to the virus versus it just being a coincidence along with the real cause of death.
After the fact, there will be hardening of opinions, so that many will say, "we needed to do everything we did for as long as we did in order to conquer this virus". But I can't imagine there being any way of proving or disproving this contention.
About the only hard science will be with the statisticians who can easily say, "here is the point where the R value began declining, and here is where it became less that one." The R value is in index of how many others an infected person transmits the virus to.
On the plus side, observation suggests that we getting past the panic buying mode, since various items are at least temporarily reappearing on grocers' shelves.
At the same time, there remains extreme uncertainty on how long the current measures will last. It isn't helped by Dr. Fauci and Trump talking about 100,000 deaths in the US -- if we only have 8,500 so far, how long will it take to reach 100,000? Does that mean we're in for this for a year? Looking at some detail, there were 92 more deaths today compared with yesterday. A month of days like that is 2,760. Divide that into 91,500 (the remaining number to reach 100,000), and you get 33 -- that's approaching 3 years!

Correction: One always has to understand the data you're looking at. I was watching the daily counts of infections and deaths on The Guardian website, and only later realized that, rather than showing counts from the day before, the counts were for that day, and since I look at the site early in the day, that's why the counts were so low.