1/ Another point about lockdowns and their effectiveness or lack thereof. The Germans found that a hard lockdown reduces R to 1 or so. But in a place like NYC, where a huge bolus of infections has occurred just *before* the lockdown (as the hospitalization data clearly show)...

2/ Whether the R is 1 or 2 or even 3 matters less than it seems - because the population of people who are ALREADY infected is so large that the virus will inevitably infect everyone else (without extraordinary measures to protect small, vulnerable populations)...

3/ The math goes like this: If 10% of the population is infected, say, lockdowns can't extinguish the virus quickly enough to matter; if 1% is, the lockdowns must remain in place for a VERY long time to matter. Almost tautogically, they will come either too early or too late.

And by matter, I don't mean that the lockdowns will reduce deaths (except that we can expect treatments to improve slowly over time even without targeted therapies as physicians learn more about managing the disease) - just that they will end the chance of hospital overrun...

At this point, that appears to be ALL that lockdowns can do. Only hospitals and physicians and nurses are getting crushed anyway BECAUSE the lockdowns are destroying everything else they do (oh the irony). So there's that.