Might be a blessing in disguise. People will become afraid well before it reaches their country. Maybe we actually have the willpower to stop it if it's actually quite lethal, and then it's indeed RIP (COVID). Since we apparently can't manage to announce a few months ahead a global 2 week lockdown, just stock up and afterwards nobody is infectious anymore. For the few essential people that need to be out (doctors, caretakers, police), switch on the last day and they now isolate for two weeks. Probably best to also add self-tests to the mix towards the end of the two weeks. Instead, so far, we'd rather have intermittent half-assed lockdowns for years on end and millions of deaths. Idk, a proper lethal variant (with the infectiousness before symptoms like it is now, else it wouldn't spread) might motivate us to solve the problem rather than to keep failing to try.