Government scientific advisers have already said that if they can get death down to 20,000 or below that will be fantastic achievement. In the best of best case scenarios they're already consigned to thousands dying.
It clearly is. If government policy was to drop infection rates to below 1 then they'd have called a complete shutdown days ago. That is they
only way to achieve that. What we are seeing is what I keep telling you yet you keep willfully refusing to address and consistently mischaracterising. They adopting a suppression method with a staggered approach in order to allow for a greater infection spread among the healthy for the greatest time possible before it's not feasible.
Just think about it rationally, what has changed with the outbreak that schools were safe to be open for this entire past week but not next week? What has changed with this outbreak that pub, clubs. bar etc... were safe to be open yesterday but not tomorrow? Nothing. Do you honestly think health experts have changed their minds in a day? Do you honestly think a days delay has any serious economic benefit? No. The point was allow to continued controlled spread. Just look at the wording being used to justify the actions "now it the time to exert more downward force on the curve". Why now? All that's happened between now and yesterday was more people infected. And that is the point.
Eventually the government will want R0 to be 1 or below but what they don't want is to achieve that too early or too aggressively because as I keep telling you it'll be all for nothing once they relax measures and outbreaks resume as we have little to no breaks within the transmission line.
You keep conflating two completely separate things despite me correcting you 3 times now. Mitigation and herd immunity are two different things. What you keep trying to critique is the mitigation process. With mitigation the policy was to only isolate those with the disease and over 70s. That is it. That's all the measures that would have been place. That's what people keep talking about when they mention these half a million figures. That
was the governments policy, but it no longer is. What the government is now doing is suppression whereby they are calling for social distancing of anyone with potential symptoms and their families, closure of schools and universities and preventing large gatherings. Now the problem with this route is, and if you read the ICL report you'd know this since it's littered across it, is that once measures are relaxed you'll see an even massive spike of cases in the winter months.
Do you see that green and orange spikes in November and December? That's what I keep telling you. It's beyond pointless to enact extreme suppression methods now if ~8months time when you relax them you're going to have an even worse situation. So as I keep telling you what the government are doing is walking a tight rope between suppressing the infection enough so that it doesn't impact the at risk but also allowed enough infection so some degree of herd immunity builds up to a sufficient level so that by the winter months we have enough breaks in the transmission chain that we can bring that curve down. Because it's not realistic in the slightest to have these strict measures in place for 18 months.
You're misconstruing herd immunity and mitigation. They are two different things. All the stats you're listing are NOT about herd immunity, they're about a mitigation policy. Before you call people morons at lest get that basic distinction correct.
Even with a strict suppression policy models have shown without a doubt that cases will spike to peak levels if herd immunity have not been achieved. The literature is littered with this exact point, how you all keep missing it is beyond me.
That's what the government is doing. Suppressing the infection but trying to build up enough herd immunity that we don't see a recurrence of cases once it's relaxed.