Looking at academic studies of the effectiveness of social-distancing during the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. The cities that did it early and did it consistently fared better than the cities that were laxer. When they stopped (see bottom bars), sometimes the flu surged back. 
Source on this: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1768418…
Kind of rough, but America's experience during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919 mimics what we just saw in China: Wuhan got slammed by the initial outbreak and shut down too late, but other cities had time to watch and act and got spared the brunt: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
a reference on that: statnews.com/2020/02/25/new…
Like, what do you do when people aren't working during a mass shut-in? Do companies keep people on payroll? How do they not go bankrupt in the meanwhile? How do poorer people get income to buy essentials? ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
This is super interesting. One of the political weaknesses of the 1918 influenza public-gathering bans is that people (understandably) got mad when their thing got shut down while somebody else's thing was allowed to stay open. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Ah, I see America's 1918 flu-fighters had to resort to the ol' "make the moisturizer bottle available in tactical black" trick to get men to stop being gross: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
A MORE MODERN, MANLY FORM OF PUBLIC HEALTH
this study points out that gamers and various other Netflix depressives will protect us from the next Spanish Flu ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
