Elimination could be the optimal response strategy for covid-19 and other emerging pandemic diseases: The goal of elimination is a major departure from pandemic influenza mitigation. With a mitigation goal, the response is typically to increase stringency as the pandemic progresses and for more disruptive interventions, such as school closures, to be held in reserve to flatten the peak. By contrast, the goal of elimination rapidly escalates the stringency of control measures to extinguish chains of transmission. Choosing a strategy is not necessarily a fixed path, and countries might change their approach. Sweden, for example, initially seemed to pursue a version of mitigation with the intent of achieving herd immunity and then seemed to switch to a suppression strategy.
