I agree it's hyperbolic, but the numbers are staggering and quoting the current deaths are really misleading in this respect. This will affect small percentages of everyone. A million deaths world wide, with a disease that is expected to reach 60+% of the population is not much. It's the difference in the death rate of 0.02%. In other words, if a sufficiently early intervention manages to reduce the death rate from 1% to 0.98%, that's a million lifes saved.

However, the sensitive dependence on initial conditions only applies to things that happen during exponential growth. By the time a vaccine hits (according to many reputable sources about a year from now) we will be in a very different stage of the disease anyway.

So you expect some mechanism to prevent the exponential growth then? Which?

..and it should come years from now. Hearing some researchers talk about fast tracking a SARS-cov2 vaccine in 18 ~24 months seems terribly unsafe. Vaccines need extensive animal testing following by phased human trials, less we have a repeat of the Lyme disease vaccine.

General vaccines for Corona virus families should have started years ago. H1N1 had a vaccine because it was a known flu that was researched previously. It was just the ramp-up/production time that was the issue there.