As I speculated from the variables in the equation, isolation prolongs the pandemic by several weeks -- it slows the spread but does not stop it. We hope it drastically decreases the amplitude, assuming isolation continues for several weeks.
Also in the 2020-03-10 COVID-19 update on ArsTech:
"public health experts were critical of the moves, calling some of them draconian and ineffective. For instance, quarantines, which can clumsily round up the sick with the healthy, may not prevent the spread of disease—which we certainly saw on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, quarantined in Japan. And travel restrictions in our highly-connected world are inevitably leaky."
". . .a new non-peer-reviewed, unpublished study, an international team of researchers estimated that without the measures, the number of cases in mainland China would have been 67-times higher. And if officials had begun implementing them just one week earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent. If they had implemented them three weeks earlier, cases would have been reduced by 95 percent.
". . . in a Twitter thread March 10, one of the coauthors of that study, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, noted that as community spread increases, social distancing—however painful—becomes essential to slowing and minimizing the impact."
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See also: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-answers-covid-19/ why the US healthcare services and materials are woefully inadequate to the deluge of severe cases in early May.
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