@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.

@adrysdale By the way, as I covered, long term cases are what we care about, not short term case count, not initial case count, and not death rate (since this varies greatly on comorbidity which is not similar)... But even if you really insist at looking at overall numbers instead of trends.. America still looks pretty good. While we still cant really look at deaths because Americans tend to be significantly more obese, we can look at cases to get an outlook on case number, an the USA doesnt look bad at all.

Compare overall case count in the USA vs Canada, for example:

USA: 0.00679% is, as of today, the current percentage of the population infected

Canada: 0.00565%

So very comparable in terms of overall percentage of the population infected, coupled with the fact that the USA has had a decrease of 1/3 in case count with a downward trend since June while canada has had a 9x increase in case count in that same period and is trending upward faster every week. I think that says everything when we really look at America's long-term outlook which looks a hell of a lot better than canadas.

Hell lets look at a few other countries just to make sure that isn't a fluke.

In that time the UK has seen a 5x increase in case count, In terms of infection rate currently 0.0107% of the population is effected with corona virus, thats nearly **twice** the total case count over the USA.. So presuming you are from wales it looks like you should be criticising the UK before the USA, your much **much** worse off than us.

The Netherlands in that time, my second home, has had a wopping 53x increase in case count in that time. Thats 0.0190% of the population has it, that is 2.8x higher than the usa.

Sweden is a bit different only because they actually followed the pattern of the a bit USA and didnt have strict across the board lockdowns, which as I stated was our saving grace. But even then they pushed things a bit too far and didnt do as well a job as the USA in terms of long term outlook, but for now they are doing one of the best out of europe, as a fluke more than anything else. Even so since early to mid july sweden's case rate has increased a whopping 16.3x while the USA, as I stated has decreased by 1/3 in that time. The total percentage of population currently infected is 0.00671%. So they have virtual the exact same infection rate as the USA, but with an infection rate trend of 16x increase and still going up while the USA is at 1/3rd down.. I'd say even europe's best country, sweden, the USA would have ya beat.

Literally the USA is overall doing significantly better than almost any country we could compare to in Europe or even canada or the UK... Long term we made the right call.

Lets not forget the economic fallout we avoided by not laying on the lockdown too hard!