I'm not familiar with the biochemistry of diseases, but I do understand military tactics so I came at the whole thing from a different perspective that suddenly made a lot of sense to my friend when he asked me: "Why wouldn't a lockdown work?"

I told him, paraphrasing:

Because it's not a lockdown. Think about it. Everyone in a community has all of their travel shut down except for one place (points at Walmart) where everyone will HAVE to go within the week if they want food. They can't even use both doors, only one set. That's not a lockdown. That's a chokepoint. You think the government is trusting the health and safety of the US to Walmart employees??? Chokepoints aren't going to prevent disease, they're going to spread it. Nobody's even been told to wear gloves.

Why do you think the Surgeon General was dressed in full military garb when addressing the public initially? Why do you think there were allusions to this being like a war. The president was told that millions of people were going to die from this disease, and this disease is exactly what you would want a bio-weapon to behave like: long incubation, asymptomatic, moderate lethality, but with total incapacitation. It looks like biological warfare. Whether it is or isn't is not relevant: and the military isn't going to risk it being one without responding aggressively. So how are they going to respond to a biological attack?

Well, first you gotta know where it is! How the hell do you find that out? Well, what if you forced everyone in the country to go through a single set of doors which also happens 24/7 video recorded along with the reset of the facility, and has a strict policy on the exact number of people allowed inside at a given time, and you have to use a payment processor to purchase anything which will allow your purchase history to act as your movement history. If you ban everyone else from going outside that store, the only place where they can get the disease is at Walmart, and you know exactly who they were with and when they were with them to the very second.

Once you know where the disease is, you can funnel medical resources to those locations and institute a proper quarantine. ... Of course, that means that after a few weeks of this everyone else is allowed to re-open.

And, of course, if you did this for one two week span and found that the virus was in every single major and minor city in the US because the disease had arrived in Washington state 4 months ago... well you wouldn't need a tracking mechanism at all since it's already everywhere. Herd Immunity is the only possible solution at that point. From then on, a Lockdown would be the opposite of helpful.