"We shut down much of the world in the spring for more than those proverbial “two weeks”…
Not even close.
A true quarantine necessary to stop the virus dead in its tracks would require everyone - I mean everyone - to stay home for two weeks. That means no one, not grocery store clerks, doctors, police, nurses, etc., goes out in public.
Obviously an impossible situation except in the most localized of outbreaks. Hence my assertation.
But the lockdowns did “delay the inevitable”. Rather, they slowed down the rate of infection. But to think this was a useless exercise is to neglect the full context. The point was to buy time…
…time for hospitals to get over the surge and develop better procedures for handling the sick. Months later the death rate has been reduced due to better treatments.
…time to develop a vaccine.
This latter point is important. If it takes a year to develop a vaccine, then do you want to be killing 10,000 people a day by doing nothing and letting the virus run its course? Or do you want to slow the spread down to 1,000 people a day with partial restrictions? The second choice results in the most lives saved.
PS - you’re right, many readers are pilots and driven by data. Yet a number of pilots still ignore the data of their fuel gauge, totalizer, and/or watch just because the inconvenience of stopping for gas is too much of a bother.