SamYeager
Simplistic? Yes - I'm well under 60, years off being able to retire, but I am still being advised by government (central and local) and doctors to go out as little as possible, and only return to work if I can assure it is "covid secure" - which I can't, so I can't work (or at least not the type of job I had before). That is current guidance for the "extremely clinically vulnerable" category (and in a local area heading towards another lockdown right now because of idiots going out and spreading it), and I am sticking to it because in March being proactive and acting in advance of being told to shield saved me when it spread through my wife's workplace and she brought it home. Some of her colleagues family members got it. Yep, they had "pre-existing conditions", so do I. like me they were not dying any time soon (until covid). Like me they were probably looking forward to retiring in another decade or two. I still am, if we can get through this, they aren't.
Second wave "mythical"? - not if you actually look at the data rather than the headline "deaths" rate. We (some of us, not me) ignored the warnings from Italy before the first wave with the result that we followed them a few weeks behind. We can ignore the warnings from Spain and France now, or we can follow them a few weeks behind (which is where our cases are). Deaths are a lagging indicator, by 3-4 weeks plus reporting delays, and with the rise in cases being driven by the less-vulnerable young, the lag will be even bigger. Eventually the case load amongst the young will reach a critical mass and start to spill over into the old and vulnerable - this is apparently now showing in the test data today (seen reports stating that, but not checked today's data myself yet). Rise in hospitalizations will follow (some increase already showing in the data) and then, inevitably, rise in deaths - Spain is already there. Problem is that on a exponential curve (currently said to be doubling every week) with a four week lag, by the time the death rate hits a worrying level, it's too late to prevent a level at least an order of magnitude higher. We have ample warning and ample understanding now of how this goes, will we brake in time or will we leave it too late and inexorably go of the end of the runway, again?