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You're forgetting the development of a vaccine. With enough time (10 years is way more than enough), a vaccine will be developed and deployed, and that capacity won't be needed because far fewer people will contract the disease and develop symptoms requiring hospitalization.

The problem is, developing and testing a vaccine takes some time. How much time do we have before the global economy totally collapses?

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> With enough time (10 years is way more than enough), a vaccine will be developed and deployed

Based on what? It’s been more than 10 since SARS and we still don’t have a vaccine. I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about immunization when it is far, far too early to know. Also, the point is that we don’t want to be quarantined for 10 years, we want to build the capacity now.

They probably never developed a SARS vaccine because it didn't turn into a major worldwide pandemic. There's lots of diseases that don't have vaccines mainly because it's seen as not worth the effort or cost. SARS and MERS looked scary at first but never got this big.

As an addition here, look at Ebola. It was perfectly feasible to create a vaccine, but no one bothered as long as it was confined to Africa. As soon as white people in western nations started getting it, then suddenly there was a huge effort to create a vaccine.

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