There is a lot we don’t know yet about this virus and its progression.
The Washington Post says it depends on a variety of factors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/16/social-distancing-coronavirus
How long are we going to have to keep this up? The closed schools, working from home, six feet of personal space and zombie-apocalypse empty streets? It’s the question now preoccupying America as millions of parents silently scream it into the void amid the coronavirus pandemic. But it is an especially hard one for science to answer.
A thoughtful article posing a longer scenario can be found here in the Huffington Post:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/social-distancing-imperial-college-london-coronavirus_n_5e742e9ac5b6f5b7c5416fac
…but it is a report that Ferguson released on March 16 that jolted governments in the U.S. and U.K. into action…Ferguson concluded that “intensive, and socially disruptive interventions … most notably, large scale social distancing, will need to be in place for many months, perhaps until a vaccine becomes available.
This Medium article reflects on the strategies called “the hammer” and “the dance” and what those might mean for the duration of the virus and the need for social distancing https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.
