It isn't counter factual. We flattened the curve! Why did we not have outbreaks in Florida three months ago? Because we had flattened the curve! The naughty truth that the brigade of curve flatteners failed to mention early on is that as soon as mitigation strategies are let up, the cases would skyrocket. This is exactly what is happening. Flatten the curve is, was and will continue to be a pipe dream. The virus will win. It will infect _n_ people until it reaches _x_ saturation and burn out. Or we get a vaccine and distribute it to artificially help it reach _x_ faster. That is the only way out of this. What did you expect when a population with little prior exposure locked down for three months and then unlocked? They would be protected by their good intentions?

You are making an assumption that this would ravage the labor force. Not to be glib, but unless your country has a labor force primarily comprised of 75+ year old workers, no labor force is getting ravaged by this disease. Yes, people will get sick. Some will die. Some will die from loneliness. In the time it took me to write this, hundreds of children died of preventable disease the world over. Some died of starvation. Some of lack of access to clean water. A woman was just murdered and another killed her lover, probably, somewhere. We can't ever have zero risk and to advertise otherwise is irresponsible at best.

Also please note, the poor and minority people that you are claiming to protect through blunt force lockdowns are actually the ones still working. Still butchering your meat, picking your fruits, delivering your Amazon order and washing your apartment complex. And the poor who aren't lucky enough to still be in work and in debt, falling further behind and face the least amount of economic security in 100 years. Let people decide what is best for them, you have no moral authority to claim righteousness in your cause and disparage mine.

Please, don't accuse me being counter-factual unless you want to counter my facts. Yes, I left Germany out. Germany is interesting. There are some theories around about that, but I am not well versed enough on them to comment, so I didn't include it. Well caught. I apologize for not blindly speculating and instead passing it over.

Finally, we were already told that mitigation saved two million lives: https://www.cato.org/blog/did-mitigation-save-two-million-li... so the corollary is that had we not mitigated, two million would be dead. And the Imperial College model really did estimate that much. Though they didn't give such a precise timeline: https://www.cato.org/blog/how-one-model-simulated-22-million...

And lets not forget the folks at the UW: A different, data-driven model from researchers at the University of Washington predicts “about 1 million cases in the U.S. by the end of the epidemic, around the first week in June, with new cases peaking in mid-April,” said UW applied mathematician Ka-Kit Tung, who led the work. “By the first week of June, we project that the number of new cases will be close to zero if current social distancing policies are maintained.” That model predicted two weeks ago that the number of new daily cases would peak around now, as seems to be the case. (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-mod...). Again in that model, nobody ever talked about what comes next. I will tell you. More cases. Or immunity. One of those two.