You know, I understand that normies can't do simple reasoning. But that epidemiologists can't or won't do it either drives me up a fucking wall. Epidemic spread, that basic reproduction number R, depends on two things. R0, the basic reproductive rate. And S, the proportion of the population susceptible. Nothing else, unless I (proportion of the population infected) = 0, which is a trivial case. You can manipulate R0 with lockdowns and masks and all the rest. In the absence of a vaccine, you can manipulate S only by having people get infected. It doesn't depend on anything else. Most particularly, it doesn't depend on fucking d(R0)/dt, the rate of change of the reproductive rate. It's not a bomb on a light trigger, you can't back away slowly and have it not go off. R0, and S. The equations say it, the data supports it (qualitatively, though not quantitatively for simple models).

One consequence of this is that if you want to ever not be locked down -- that is, have R0 return to R0_0, the original R0 before the lockdown -- you need to increase S. Which means people are going to be infected. Ain't no way around it. Another consequence is that the harder you lock down, the longer it's going to take to get through it.

Yet epidemiologists still babble on about how places released their lockdowns "too fast", and governors supposedly informed by health departments keep lockdowns in place indefinitely. I don't know which is most charitable: that these people are totally incompetent, that they're lying and they want lockdown until vaccine or that they're lying and want lockdown until elimination. I suspect it may be the less charitable "lying for power and want lockdowns forever".