Likewise an effective cure for the Wuhan Virus won't materially reduce the total number infected. It just means less will die or suffer permanent impairment.
The Spanish Flu was not mitigated on any significant scale, yet the total proportion of those infected worldwide and in the US varied by less than 4% - 500 million of 1400 million worldwide (35.7%), and 31 million of 103 million Americans (32%).
I'll use the 1918 Spanish Flu as a model for one-year infectiveness for a virgin field airborne-transmissible epidemic until there is convincing evidence to the contrary.
Note that I have always postulated multiple waves of infection for the Wuhan Virus over a one-year period. This is simply NOT a One-And-Done disease. It will hit us with periodic waves until it mutates to a less deadly form, humanity develops herd immunity, or an effective vaccine is used worldwide.
The media is incapable of learning this until this first wave subsides and a second one comes along. Medical authorities are too wrapped up in dealing with the Now to look ahead six months. The only thing American politicians are looking ahead to are elections in November.
“The Spanish Flu was not mitigated on any significant scale”
That can be disputed. There were plenty of quarantines, calls for social distancing, hand washing, etc. Time to travel was a form of mitigation inherent in the technological level of that time compared to now.
But the differences I see as most significant are the spread of the disease by asymptomatics, the contagiousness of it and the mobility of the population.
There were not tens of thousands of college students flying home to everywhere in the country from Spring Break in 1918. For example. Catch it on the beach, jump on a plane, give it to Grandma three days later before you even have symptoms or even the person you got it from has symptoms. Even if you both end up on ventilators later on.