Hate to disagree with you fon and your much vaunted actuaries.
But as l explained on here now many times Leicester has been virtually in full lockdown since 23March 2020.
Despite this draconian measure bringing the City to its knees, the Leicester Mercury rejoiced in announcing a record day for infections in the City yesterday. I am sorry but please can either you or your admired actuaries explain the success of lockdown, because either l am exceptionally thick (possible) or you and the actuaries are wrong!!!!
Added to this the people of Leicester East the hardest hit area of the city have a suspended MP, so no representation for their concerns either. So these people have been totally abandoned.

the primary interest of actuaries is to measure risk and uncertainty, mostly with respect to balance sheets and asset value, to predict (for example) pension fund sustainability. This matters because actuaries intentionally avoid getting involved with the morality of various policy measures, they will do what SAGE should be doing, using objective evidence based science to characterise the effects of the covid-19 pandemic. Hence their work will be a hard nosed economic evaluation, without emotional involvement.

The French alt news site les-crises.fr is run by an actuary. He is zealously pro-lockdown in a non-falsifiable way (if a lockdown fails, then it was just too early/too late), reader comments tend to be disabled on COVID topics, and he was obsessively opposed to the use of hydroxychloroquine. Actuaries will tend not to step out of line for the same reason as doctors or investment managers; if they take a minority stance and they turn out to be wrong, that's a career disaster.

You're still doing the "lets not think ahead more than 2 weeks" fallacy.

It's the actuaries' conclusions, nor mine!
all the models predict large suppression results in nothing more than a large spike and R about 4 weeks after release which means you need to do it again, and again and again with it getting slightly worse each time.

True, and stringent restrictions, were all similarly effective in bringing down both cases and admissions at a reasonably rapid rate.

Hence if that is all you want to do, that's a way to do it, but you'll wind up with a large spike and R about 4 weeks after release, unless every person you care about has been vaccinated, which is the point of the accelerated immunology service.

mid to long term that make a situation worse.

I follow you, but, in this case, mid to long term is after their landing ground, mid february which, they say, is when the immunology service will have reached the main tranche of vulnerable subjects. By then we will be on the other side of this thing, it does not matter what R is then.

With the ONS reporting yesterday 40,000 excess deaths in 'personal home' settings 1 can only ascertain that the collateral damage from lockdowns far outweighs any benefit. The cure is worse than the cause!

All deaths COVID-19 deaths five-year average Excess deaths
Home
139,719 3,881 99,605 40,114

Hospital (acute or community, not psychiatric)
207,049 54,688 193,357 13,692

Care home
116,400 20,574 90,198 26,202

Other
33,694 1,687 34,035 -341

You're still doing the "lets not think ahead more than 2 weeks" fallacy.

What I'm really doing is showing lockdowns do something, and it is (or may be) possible to predict what they do, in other words it may be possible to calibrate restrictions, in a way that makes it useful for some specific purpose. It would make it possible to design a lockdown, with certain properties, to have an effect on a pandemic that steers it to a better state,maximising the pros while minimising the cons. It might be impossible.

If this virus is endemic, we will adopt national policies to find a balanced way to live with it. These would employ appropriate vaccine campaigns, calibrated restrictions if unavoidable, much improved planning by the NHS, a certain degree of "nudge politics" to steer people towards virus responsible behaviour, e.g shopping when stores are empty, at night. A certain rejigging of our systems, e.g. working from home, mask wearing, and various other infringements to freedom. We already do these things for e.g. alcoholic drinks,gun ownership, foreign travel, or car driving, there are zillions of restrictions. There will be more perhaps before we find a virus responsible way to live. You might call this change the Great Reset.