It's not reduced to 0. It's flattened so as not to overwhelm the hospital system.
It reduces the total number of patients, but it still gets well over 50% of the pouplation that gets it.
Doesn't bode well for the elderly who, even when treated, have a fairly high die-off rate (doesn't break 20%, but who's happy saying that 10% of an age group will die. The stats have been out for a while, but the media are just seeing the numbers for various age groups and the results of just oxygen, ventilator use, or blood oxygenation. For some groups, the results are fairly good--very critical to walking out in 7 days. For other groups, ventilator use still has majority of the patients die after a couple of weeks or more, and even blood oxygenation still sees about half die
The other goal is to make it last so long that there's a vaccine. But that means a year of this kind of thing, which'll be rough. I'm assuming that medical folk, known for being cautious, will be saying it'll take "at least 18 months" to develop the vaccine. But, as with most drug trials, if the stuff is shown to be fairly low-risk and shows a benefit, the trial will continue while emergency approval is given for use. Sometimes this is foolish, as "low-risk" turns out to be misquantified, and sometimes the medicine turns out to be not so useful. Given the fatality rate for this bug, though, the only real issue will be indemnification for its use: Your uncle Johnny dies from the vaccine (for whatever reason) it's bad, and it's unlikely he'd have died if he'd contracted the vaccine. You wouldn't stop to say, "More lives were saved than lost, it's a sacrifice for the common good." You'd want blood.
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