I'd agree that comparing raw death numbers isn't especially helpful for a number of reasons, and less helpful still until the thing is over. But the IFR *is* a good indicator, and the evidence is increasingly pointing towards that being less than 0.2% - which does put it in 'bad flu year' territory, as does the demographic breakdown of those who have died.
And once again we're in disagreement.
I'd say that IFR is only part of the story with the other part being how contagious it is.
I believe SARS had a pretty high fatality rate, but it didn't spread that easily.
Something with the same infection fatality rate as flu is a much bigger problem if it is spread much more easily - and that doesn't just refer to how contagious an infected individual is - it depends on how likely people are to be contagious but well enough to be out and about.
We will see in the end, once it's run its course one way or the other and we get to see to what extend excess deaths now are balanced by a reduction in the future as people didn't survive to be killed by the next bad flu season etc.
And indeed whether it's just impossible to put a lid on it and in the end everyone is going to have to take their chances.
Interestingly I've seen graphs where people have tried to calculate R based on the available data, and found that R possibly fell below 1 a few days *before* the lockdown. For political reasons, we didn't give the milder pre-lockdown measures time to see if they worked.
A lockdown on the healthy is very much a nuclear option, given the damage to the economic and society as a whole. You should only do it if you are pretty darn certain it will work.
I think this is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. Yes a lockdown is a huge measure and not to be undertaken lightly. But if it
is needed, every day's delay costs lives and lengthens the time you will need it for. I think the flirtation with herd immunity has cost lives and (perhaps more importantly in the long term) significantly increased the time we needed it for.
I don't think the modelling that R was dropping before the full lockdown is very robust though I haven't looked at it in detail. But if we'd decided to stick to the milder restrictions and see what happened, there is a good chance that what happened would have been far more deaths than we have seen.
It also occurs to me that if it is true that the infection was seeded by a relatively large number of people coming in from Italy and other countries, any attempt to calculate R over that period will fail because it has to assume that each infection you see comes from transmission within the area you're calculating R for.
So we may have seen an artificially high value of R over the period before travel was restricted. (I don't think errors in R due to this will have had much impact on policy because I don't think the calculations supporting lockdown were taken primarily from UK data).
I think the one of the best things that the government could have done is to have declared essential travel only to countries where we knew Covid was taking a hold much earlier - and even offered to cover all losses from people without insurance that would cover it.
That takes some hindsight perhaps.
I imagine that
next time round governments will be much quicker to take action, and it would be considered far more acceptable to do so.