There is no stopping the virus. That never was the point. The initial lockdown was to “flatten the curve”’ Even the most enthusiastic lockdown proponents never thought we could change the area under the curve. One could argue whether that was successful or not but it has been many months since resources were tight.
I live in a “hot spot” where cases and hospitalizations are rising. The death rate however is not rising and hospitals are busy but nowhere near overwhelmed so the initial reasons for lockdown do not apply. We are much better at treating this thing and i believe the virus is attenuating was well. That is not stopping our politicians and public health nazis from taking is backwards again. We have has a universal masking order for months - totally ineffective but they are doubling down on it
The virus is in the community. It will continue to spread no matter what we do. we can only increase the damage by overreacting with ineffective measures to try to contain the uncontainable. The question is how many lives will we ruin unnecessarily before we come to our senses?
The question is, why won't our leaders lead?
Nationally, our fatalities per day are up a little. As would be expected, some areas are up substantially, while others are not. France however, is a mess. They just had a 523 fatality day, the highest since, I believe, April 23, and the October rise is coming off, as Jim Noble mentioned, many weeks of low numbers. There is no evidence that if they continue the policies of the last couple months, the French fatalities curve will do anything but continue to accelerate for some time. One has to assume* the "serious/critical cases" curve is out in front of the fatalities curve. The question is, what treatment capacity for these s/c cases does France now have?
*Real data would be best, of course, if anyone has it.
What to do? It seems to me that if likely fatalities* from COVID-19 strongly exceed likely fatalities from a vaccine (perhaps not proven as safe as vaccines usually must be judged), say by a factor of 10, you go with the vaccine. This esp. for high risk (from CV-19) groups.