@adrysdale Yes but its a good thing, particularly when looking long term.

The fact people keep dancing around is 1) this virus is here for the long term, years, even with a vaccine, and it is unlikely we will have an effective vaccine given the facts (past failures over decades to produce corona vaccines coupled with the observed nature of coronavirus-class immunity).

This means that eventually, if you let up a lock down, eventually the overall case numbers willcatch up, at least until some sense of limited herd immunity kicks in.

So there are only two options really.. 1) you stay in perpetual lockdown forever, everytime you release lock down the spread starts from scratch and when it starts to increase you go back into lockdown.. this obviously isnt feasible to be in lockdown forever.. 2) you accept the situation, let up lock down, you get a huge spike and case number which eventually levels off and stabilizes at reasonable numbers once some limited herd immunity catches up.

Here is the thing, we are all in situation #2 in all likelihood, no one will keep a lockdown going forever. This means, long term, we are all going to get the same % infected as we would if we never did a lockdown at all. Lockdowns delay the inevitable, but in the end they do nothing to reduce case numbers, this should be obvious why really, all it does is hit pause (or slow motion) on the virus and has no lasting effect once its over.

So you are really looking at things all backwards, the question you need to ask is what is the point of the lockdown, and it wasnt so fewer people get sick from coronavirus (overall).. the point was exactly what doctors said early on it was suppose to be, to level the curve. That is, to slow down the initial spread of the virus so ICU departments of hospitals didnt reach 100% capacity, nothing more. Any lockdown beyond that is more harmful than good since the only benefit from lockdown is to keep ICU under capacity, the goal is **not** to reduce case numbers, nor could it.

So any reference to overall case numbers is pointless, though we do care about trends. The trends prove this very point, the USA released lockdown once we know our ICUs were not going to go past capacity. We had an initial spike, as expected, and then a significant and sustained downward trend since June, also as expected. Our ICU capacity never went over the 100% mark, ergo success.

Europe you dont see that wisdom embodied in their plan though. They pushed lockdown way beyond what it was intended for (to keep ICU under capacity. The end result is they did nothing to reduce their case count long term, as we see by the fact that most countries in europe and canada have experienced 4x to 8x increases in case count since then.

You have to understand in data science we care about trends, cause and effect, not absolute numbers, and the nuance matters too. Absolute numbers dont really help you much when you talk about nations with very different distributions of comorbities in its population, and when the long term outlook is more important than any effects in the short term. But most importantly it should just be common sense why lockdowns beyond reducing ICU capacity have no long term positive outcome.