An overall long-term strategy for managing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is presented. This strategy will need to be maintained until herd immunity is achieved, hopefully through vaccination rather than natural infection. We suggest that a pure test-trace-isolate strategy is likely not practicable in most countries, and a degree of social distancing, ranging up to full lockdown, is the main public-health tool to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by reliable surveillance data, distancing should be continuously optimised down to the lowest sustainable level that guarantees a low and stable infection rate in order to balance its wide-ranging negative effects on public health. The qualitative mixture of social-distancing measures also needs to be carefully optimised in order to minimise social costs.