The thing about exponential growth is that it is slow growing (relatively) in the beginning. This means if we cycled between lockdown and business as usual we can keep things contained quite easily. Not sure what would be most efficient, but something like 1 week lockdown every 2 or 3 weeks would keep the spread minimal until a long-term solution is found.

Obviously travel etc. gum up this plan but instead of containment or mitigation we can move to a "time gapped reset" policy that predicts a continuous growth/halt cycle for the virus instead of pointlessly trying to eradicate it completely.