This is all feels both scary and surreal and part of what's hard about getting our minds around it is searching for some kind of analogue or precedent. But there really isn't a perfect one.
The closer analogy is perhaps to a nuclear disaster, like Chernobyl, or Fukushima, in which the enemy is invisible, and the battle is never really won (or, at any rate, not won for hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of years.) But nuclear disasters are more localized than this.