There was not and could not be in the 1 to 3 years span of the pandemic any safe and effective vaccine for SARs CoV 2.

Are you suggesting that the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna and the Oxford AZ Vaccine are not safe or effective? Or neither? And that all other vaccines are unlikely to be any good?
So the SARs CoV 2 pandemic of 2020 (which was over by June) will turn out to be the greatest single peace-time public health disaster since 1918.

That contradicts the " 1 to 3 years span of the pandemic" you mentioned. If it were over by June, how come the ZOE symptom checker app presently records 672,959 live cases, and rising? Is it all in their heads?
most of the excess deaths will be due to incompetent government polices in response to the initial outbreak rather than the actual primary pandemic. Totally unlike 1918. Or any other pandemic in the last 100 years for that matter.

What would have been the correct policy? Why do you say "incompetent government" when the policies were suggested by chief scientists?

I agree with your overall conclusions fon, just not totally in agreement with how you've arrived at them 🙂

It's OK, I have my methods. I'll tell you another time I used the same trick. I saw a plot with a small inflection point in it, and I needed to know the exact time it started to change. So I did a least squares on the month of data before the almost invisible change, and a least squares on the month of data after the change, and literally draw the straight lines on a printed copy. Projecting down where they crossed was the time I wanted. I looked in the spacecraft logs (thousands of time tagged entries) and at that time was a mention of a change of instrumentation. That's what I need to know. I had the change reversed, and I saved the client 10% of his fuel budget, worth $25,000,000 in extra satellite lifetime. That's the difference between a scientist and an engineer. To the engineer, the world is not a theory full of functions, it is a practical matter, a real thing, to be controlled by hook or by crook.

That's the difference between a scientist and an engineer. To the engineer, the world is not a theory full of functions, it is a practical matter, a real thing, to be controlled by hook or by crook.

A lecturer posed a question to a scientist and an engineer:

If a naked man was 10m away from a naked woman and could walk half the distance between them every minute, how long would it be before they could make love?

The scientist said it would take an infinite time and they could never make love. The engineer said it would take about 11 minutes to get within a practical distance.

(Note: for the purposes of this example, the practical distance was taken as within 10mm.)

The engineer said it would take about 11 minutes to get within a practical distance.

Excellent ,I must be well endowed. I'd only need 10 minutes! I'll remember that one. I never got much thanks for that spacecraft fix,just kudos, but that's engineering for you. If their accountant had saved them the 25 mil, he'd be living in a mansion with servants for life!

It turns out that with air transmitted infectious respiratory diseases there are only two barriers to a standard random diffusion spread though the susceptible fraction of the population. Therapeutic treatments or a safe effective vaccine available at the start of the outbreak. Absolutely no other measures will have any effect on the eventual area under the curve. The total number of people infected. Measure like lock-downs etc just create pinch points, temporary changes in the slope of the curve, but once those pinch points are removed there is always an above the curve rebound then a return its its normal slope.

Fascinating post jmc - and thanks for the references. Coming into this new year I should have a bit more time on my hands and might begin to do a proper look at the various models.

It seems, then, that lockdowns do little other than to shuffle things around a bit - delaying things a fraction here and there, changing a slope or two a smidgeon, but overall achieving very little in terms of the long-term progression in the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment.

So the strategy of using lockdowns in an attempt to calm things down a bit, delay some deaths and not overwhelm health services until a vaccine is available, is not without some rational foundation.

But, as you point out, this kind of strategy has consequences. Costs. Costs in terms of lives and costs in terms of livelihoods. And therein lies the $64,000 question. Has what we've done resulted in an overall net benefit? Has it been "worth" it?

That sounds like a bit of a heartless question. After all, if you believe that the lockdowns have protected your grandmother, you might baulk at the seemingly cruel attribution of cost implicit in that question. On the other hand, if you've lost your business or your employment and can no longer support your family or pay for your home, your perspective may be a little different. Not to mention those who have lost loved ones because essential treatments or investigations were delayed.

We've been bombarded on a daily basis with scary death counts and rising cases, talk of imminent collapse of our health service and even frightening stories of longcovid and organ damage. What we haven't had so much of is the other side of the lockdown coin - the damage to our ordinary, everyday lives caused by lockdown.