Yes, but once the outbreak is at a low enough level, and you have sufficient test bandwidth, you can manage it via testing and tracing. Everyone who gets sick, with anything, gets tested (in some variants of the plan every everywhere gets tested every N days). If you find a positive, quarantine them and test everyone they came in contact with. Repeat.
This reduces the rate of spread by catching community transmission before the end of its cycle. And it's worked with other outbreaks in the past. But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing, so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day. But a few dozen... probably. It definitely seems to be working in Korea.
But again, it only works once the outbreak is well contained. Stay home.
The trouble is, reducing the size of the outbreak doesn't affect the number of tests needed to do this much at all, and the number of people South Korea has been testing doesn't seem to have increased in quite a while. In fact, it seems to have actually decreased compared to back in March. Like, as far as I can tell, they're still using the same contact tracing and testing strategy that failed to contain it before without additional strong social distancing, and the social distancing is weakening.
> But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing
Not necessarily. You can just aggressively quarantine - basically the strategy in China.
> so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day
At what scale? Iceland was able to do it with ~200 new cases per day per million. The majority of US states haven't had spikes this high - nowhere in CA has even come close to that.
Iceland's per capita new infection rate peaked higher than basically any nation in the world, and while it's dropping comparatively rapidly it hasn't reached a stable baseline yet. I don't think this is a good example at all.
While it's clear their lockdown "worked" (in the sense of recovering them from a disastrous peak), I think it's still very much an open question as to whether their testing capacity will sustain this success.
Through mass testing they already avoided one nursing home hit, and haven’t had a single hit. If they do, their fatality rate could quadruple because of how small the numbers are we are looking at there.
This reduces the rate of spread by catching community transmission before the end of its cycle. And it's worked with other outbreaks in the past. But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing, so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day. But a few dozen... probably. It definitely seems to be working in Korea.
But again, it only works once the outbreak is well contained. Stay home.