> I'm not making a statement that the lockdowns should not all have happened. That is what you're inferring from what I've said.
Feel free to insert the words when they did into my original statement. What I am actually inferring from your statements that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened [when it did] due to inability to build herd immunity is that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened when it did because it reduced the ability to build some theoretical degree of herd immunity. I simply noted it was extraordinary that having suggested building this herd immunity for the coming winter was sufficiently important to warrant allowing more days/weeks of exponential spread of a then poorly-understood virus, you followup by saying herd immunity isn't a very well defined concept anyway!
(use any definition of herd immunity you like: when we're we're recording more new infections than this time last year, this ain't it!)
> The statement that more people needed to catch varient-OmegaEpsilon over variant-X to reach immunity is just daft and an argument for the sake of it.
Luckily, I didn't make that statement. I'm not sure quite how you missed the link between vaccinations and COVID being less deadly now (especially having made it yourself in the comment I replied to!) but for the avoidance of doubt I am arguing that the disease is less dangerous now, because the majority of people are vaccinated. But it is also still spreading despite it being 18 months later, many people having had the disease in the intervening time, and nearly all adults having received a vaccination which ceteris paribus greatly reduces their likelihood of transmitting the disease to others [as well as the harm it can do]. Which suggests allowing it to spread earlier last year would have been pretty futile as far as limiting COVID's ability to continue spreading in future months, but would obviously have killed some of the people who are fine catching it now.
Ultimately the extraordinary claim that Lockdown 1 was too early because we did not allow enough people to catch the disease to build up immunity but Lockdown 2 was too late (even though delaying it allowed more people to build up full immunity!) needs more justification than pointing out the lockdowns were not identical. Especially when you've already conceded the initially slower infection rate you observed in areas which had spikes earlier in the year doesn't persist as "other factors" come to dominate (i.e. there wasn't enough natural immunity on a population level to prevent mass infections). And probably still isn't, although the big advantage of being infected this winter rather than last winter or last summer is that you're a lot less likely to die.
Ultimately if you want to convince people your analysis vs the government's epidemiologists' is Galileo vs the geocentrics, you'll have to find a more persuasive evidence for your theory than telling people you've built models and they should read textbooks...
Feel free to insert the words when they did into my original statement. What I am actually inferring from your statements that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened [when it did] due to inability to build herd immunity is that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened when it did because it reduced the ability to build some theoretical degree of herd immunity. I simply noted it was extraordinary that having suggested building this herd immunity for the coming winter was sufficiently important to warrant allowing more days/weeks of exponential spread of a then poorly-understood virus, you followup by saying herd immunity isn't a very well defined concept anyway!
(use any definition of herd immunity you like: when we're we're recording more new infections than this time last year, this ain't it!)
> The statement that more people needed to catch varient-OmegaEpsilon over variant-X to reach immunity is just daft and an argument for the sake of it.
Luckily, I didn't make that statement. I'm not sure quite how you missed the link between vaccinations and COVID being less deadly now (especially having made it yourself in the comment I replied to!) but for the avoidance of doubt I am arguing that the disease is less dangerous now, because the majority of people are vaccinated. But it is also still spreading despite it being 18 months later, many people having had the disease in the intervening time, and nearly all adults having received a vaccination which ceteris paribus greatly reduces their likelihood of transmitting the disease to others [as well as the harm it can do]. Which suggests allowing it to spread earlier last year would have been pretty futile as far as limiting COVID's ability to continue spreading in future months, but would obviously have killed some of the people who are fine catching it now.
Ultimately the extraordinary claim that Lockdown 1 was too early because we did not allow enough people to catch the disease to build up immunity but Lockdown 2 was too late (even though delaying it allowed more people to build up full immunity!) needs more justification than pointing out the lockdowns were not identical. Especially when you've already conceded the initially slower infection rate you observed in areas which had spikes earlier in the year doesn't persist as "other factors" come to dominate (i.e. there wasn't enough natural immunity on a population level to prevent mass infections). And probably still isn't, although the big advantage of being infected this winter rather than last winter or last summer is that you're a lot less likely to die.
Ultimately if you want to convince people your analysis vs the government's epidemiologists' is Galileo vs the geocentrics, you'll have to find a more persuasive evidence for your theory than telling people you've built models and they should read textbooks...