Remember: The closer we get to a vaccine, the easier it is to justify a stricter lockdown.

If the logic behind that statement doesn’t seem obvious to you, think about the extreme cases: If we were in a pandemic with no chance of ever getting rid of it or finding any sort of treatment, a lockdown would make little sense. Since everyone would contract the virus eventually, very few people would be saved by the measures, but more people would suffer or even die due to the economic consequences of a lockdown whose duration would have to be indefinite. If, on the other hand, we were just two weeks away from eradicating the pandemic at the snip of a finger, then it would clearly be the correct thing to do to impose a strict lockdown for those two weeks in order to maximize the number of lives saved, since each person who manages to avoid the virus for just another two weeks would be saved from it for good.