Two weeks ago I was taking this serious, much more serious than most people, but my mind was almost convinced that we would eventually beat it, it would be gone, probably within a 4-6 month period.
But looking at how the spanish flu went down, and that most viruses become seasonal, year on year events. Its kind of hitting home that we may have to deal with this for the rest of our lives, it can potentially change a lot of our way of life for the years to come. Now it wont always be as grim as it is now, as eventually we will have vaccines and possibly even some type of medicine for those effected, and eventually the public will learn to live with it so things like sporting events would resume. This will probably be a game changer for the NHS in its long term funding and management.
Looking at countries like china, they have effectively got their rate's down to how the spanish flu was after its first wave, at a continuous very low level, but not eradicated.
There is still absolutely no evidence that letting this run will will have it peak before it infects most of the population, if as predicted that plays out, our peak is going to be further than the government has predicted. The virus will keep spreading until either (a) it runs out of people to spread to which basically almost everyone is infected, or (b) we stop it via vaccine, or (c) it mutates into a dormant form, finally (d) we almost stop it via china lockdown procedures, but of course this wouldnt kill it, it would just stall it.
With an aim of getting 40+ million infected I would be very surprised if we in any kind of normality in the upcoming months.