If your area peaked with a low number of infections, that just means that you locked down before it spread significantly within your area, and it is now dying out. The consequence is that when you unlock, there will be almost no immunity and the virus will return for a second peak, unless you wait until a vaccine has been administered to your entire population, before unlocking.
To stop the virus returning, you either need to stay locked down, or have enough immunity, either natural or vaccine generated. Maybe your state should copy Denmark and reopen the schools to increase the immunity level?
It's amusing how you keep presenting yourself as an infectious disease expert yet your concepts here seem quite oversimplistic, naive and don't conform at all to the analysis and advice of
actual experts.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Just because my local county has managed to keep a lid on the number of emerging coronavirus cases doesn't mean it's time to suddenly stop sequestering and social distancing. (we had a small hospitalization spike yesterday) My state happens to contain 255 municipalities which includes 237 towns, nine cities, five unincorporated towns, and four gores. Each area is experiencing the pandemic in different ways and to different intensities based on their location and population densities. On top of that my state has very active borders with New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York and Canada. So, the current situation in my nearby municipality and surrounding towns is part of a whole and any final decisions to be made concerning a lock down will be made with the entire state and region in mind. In fact, many states in the US are currently banding together in regional pacts for the purpose of orchestrating when and where lock downs will be opened up according to the situation on the ground to protect the safety of the largest number of people. We here in Vermont have been fortunate to have a Governor and team of public officials who have been handling this crisis decisively, professionally, effectively and openly and they've been doing that based on daily data input, modeling and common sense. Earlier this week our Governor announced that the general stay home lock down order will be extended for a month until May 15th. During this time testing will be dramatically ramped up at designated locations across the state and hospitals are setting up surge centers in places where they will be needed if and when the predicted larger wave of the disease arrives.
You seem to keep advocating the concept of herd immunity as some sort of switch that suddenly gets thrown until you achieve a desired threshold of infected individuals but that is not at all how it works, especially if you want to avoid huge numbers of deaths. Herd immunity is an evolutionary process, especially with a novel, previously unknown virus that is still little understood and that no one is immune to. Some members of the virology community have expressed uncertainty whether herd immunity is actually possible with COVID because of how this virus appears to be mutating. As a corona virus it could even be like a very deadly form of the common cold that no one really develops a long term immunity to as each mutating wave of the disease reinfects large portions of the population. People are susceptible to more than one coronavirus type common cold per year, for example. It is also still unclear if you can get COVID-19 only once like chickenpox and gain permanent immunity or whether people will require regular periodic vaccinations, like the flu but more research is needed. Assuming immunity is achievable the current projection is that it will take many, many months and possibly up to two years to happen. In the meantime, social distancing and some level of lock down, probably a rolling lock down will be with us for some time to come. In the interim, vaccines, antivirals, testing, contact tracing and other measures can be brought into play as we continue to balance protecting populations, minimizing death rates and slowly re-opening society and commerce.
Meanwhile, despite the rosy picture you keep trying to paint about coronavirus in the UK the situation may be far more dire.
(April 17, 2020)
UK was too slow on coronavirus and 40,000 could die, professor says: The British government was too slow to react on several fronts to the novel coronavirus outbreak that could cause the deaths of 40,000 people in the United Kingdom, a leading public health professor told lawmakers on Friday.
Professor Foster suggests only 10 or 15% of the UK population would achieve herd immunity after as many as 40,000 deaths and then there would be another five or six waves of the disease to come before 60% is achieved!
