We revisit the problem of minimizing the epidemic final size in the SIR model through social distancing. In the existing literature, this problem has been considered by imposing a priori interval structure on the time period during which interventions are enforced. We show that when considering the more general class of controls with an L1 constraint on the confinement effort to reduce the infection rate, the support of the optimal control is still a single time interval. In other words, for the problem of minimizing the epidemic final size in the SIR model through social distancing, there is no benefit in splitting interventions on several disjoint time periods. The techniques we deploy here are different than what has been proposed in the literature, and could be potentially applied to other problems.