I think there's huge amount of exaggeration about every aspect of Covid-19, both the likelyhood of catching it, the effects and the after effects.
I'm equally sure that social distancing has very little efficacy for strangers among the general public in day to day activities like walking and shopping. As Danidl has observed, the exposure times then are usually very short. I believe any reductions in infections from the lockdown are almost entirely due to the large numbers working from home or off work at home so not being close together at work or on public transport.
And I'm certain the rise in the infection rate, then the plateau and finally the falling away are entirely due to vulnerability. The virus takes hold and rapidly infects the most susceptible. Then the most vulnerable among them become very ill and the weakest die. Then as the numbers of susceptible and vulnerable reduce the infection and death rates fall away naturally.
I doubt we'd have had any worse figures if we'd never had any outdoor social isolation rules or inter household isolations. The latter have so many complex somewhat hidden interactions that cross infection paths always exist anyway.
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Sorry flecc, but my view is more nuanced than that in it is the cumulative effect of viral load. So for instance if every 10th person you walked past quickly was an active carrier ,it is like passing a single person very slowly. So ambling down a full Oxford Street is bad news but strolling on Hampstead heath is fine. My concern with say construction workers, is not their time on site, but the journey in the Ford Transit getting there.
The biggest blemish on the Irish performance has been the introduction of CV19 into care homes . The cycle likely being that the acute hospitals were employing the nurses ,often Filipino , usually female,and these were issued with proper protective gear. Unfortunately 10 hour exposure creates opportunities for infection. Their partners, usually male , usually less educated , equally conscious, worked in care homes.
In my opinion the mortality rate might drop as the more vulnerable are picked off ,but the infection rate will not. The huge risk and the utter unknown in the fallacy of the herd immunity concept is that viruses mutate and the more present, the greater the probability. My reading is that the RNA based virus only succeeds in making 10% identical copies of itself ,and 90% are mutations. The majority of the mutations render the virus copy inert..but there is always the outlyer.
