Because some people still don't get it. Why R matters. Projecting deaths from outset of lockdown (now we know that to have been around 1500 deaths per day) with varying R values.

If you project the death rate we had at peak growth rather than what I've projected (based on just shy of three weeks after lockdown when social distancing advice started to kick in) it instead looks like this.

Brass tacks - until the 10th of April we were seeing an average daily rise in fatalities of times 1.64. That looked like this:

...want to see what that looks like? If the disease is killing 1 in 100 people who catch it, at that rate of increase we would have run out of people who could catch it, in the UK, at 36 days - over 600k fatalities at that point.

So - you all get it now, right?