Covid would be nearly over by now if not for government interference. For example, Rt values below 1 don't cure virus, instead prevent natural acquisition of herd immunity which is the only thing keeping 50 state dictatorships in power-BBC, 6/8/20

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"The [Imperial College] model also predicted that the outbreak would be nearly over by now without lockdown, as so many people would have been infected” leading to herd immunity.”…6/8/20, BBC 

“With values of R_t below 1 in all countries, the rate of acquisition of herd immunity will slow down rapidly.“ 6/8/20, Imperial College Nature study 

June 8, 2020, “Coronavirus: Lockdowns in Europe saved millions of lives," BBC, James Gallagher, Health and science correspondent 

“Lockdowns have saved more than three million lives from coronavirus in Europe, a study estimates. 

The team at Imperial College London said the “death toll would have been huge” without lockdown. 

But they warned that only a small proportion of people had been infected and we were still only “at the beginning of the pandemic”.… 

The Imperial study assessed the impact of restrictions in 11 European countries…. 

Lockdown saved around 3.1 million lives, including 470,000 in the UK, 690,000 in France and 630,000 in Italy, the report in the journal Nature shows…. 

The model also predicted that the outbreak would be nearly over by now without lockdown, as so many people would have been infected. 

More than seven in 10 people in the UK would have had Covid, leading to herd immunity and the virus no longer spreading.”…
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Added: Imperial College Nature Study linked in above BBC article 

June 8, 2020, “Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe," Nature 

“Seth Flaxman,

• Swapnil Mishra,
• Axel Gandy,
• H. Juliette T. Unwin,
• Thomas A. Mellan,
• Helen Coupland,
• Charles Whittaker,
• Harrison Zhu,
• Tresnia Berah,
• Jeffrey W. Eaton,
• Mélodie Monod,
• Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team,
• Azra C. Ghani,
• Christl A. Donnelly,
• Steven Riley,
• Michaela A. C. Vollmer,
• Neil M. Ferguson, 
• Lucy C. Okell and
• Samir Bhatt”

“Discussion” 

“With values of R_t below 1 in all countries, the rate of acquisition of herd immunity will slow down rapidly.”…[parag. two] 

“Acknowledgments" [include Bill Gates] 

“S.B. acknowledges the NIHR BRC Imperial College NHS Trust Infection and COVID themes, the Academy of Medical Sciences Springboard award and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. L.C.O. acknowledges funding from a UK Royal Society fellowship. Initial research on covariates in Supplementary Table 2 was crowdsourced; we thank a number of people across the world for help with this. This work was supported by Centre funding from the UK Medical Research Council under a concordat with the UK Department for International Development, the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Modelling Methodology and Community Jameel. We thank F. Valka for creating our website, and A. Gelman and the Stan team for helpful discussions. We acknowledge the resources provided by Cirrus UK National Tier-2 HPC Service at EPCC (http://www.cirrus.ac.uk) funded by the University of Edinburgh and EPSRC (EP/P020267/1), and cloud compute time donated by Microsoft and Amazon.”



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