COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Not sure if this article has been posted or not, but I think it does a good job of outlining what policymakers should be aiming for with their strategies to combat the pandemic. Basically, it breaks the strategy into two phases... the Hammer and the Dance. The Hammer is when you lock everything down to get R (the transmission rate) as close to 0 as possible. These are the severe lockdowns, and would last 3-7 weeks. The earlier you implement them, the less severe they need to be and the quicker you can remove them. Then comes the dance where you try to keep R as close to 1 as possible (just underneath 1). This is where the importance of testing comes in, you can tailor your response based on data.

It also explains that the extensive testing South Korea was able to quickly implement is the reason their "Hammer" phase was not very severe and looks to be short. They were able to jump on it quickly and get R close to 0 through contact tracing without having to lock people in their homes.