[qubex]

A metaphor, if I may: think by analogy to the other famously exponential process, nuclear fission. When neutron flux gets too frisky, you have to throttle the reaction or face a catastrophe. You don’t need to disassemble the reactor to shut it down, it suffices to slam in the control rods and mop up those neutrons so they don’t trigger further fissions. Social Distancing is the “explosive dissassembly” of epidemiology: if the nuclei get too far apart (because the reactor has detonated) the reaction ceases because most neutrons “go wide” and don’t hit another nucleus. We’ve had to rely on the latter because as of yet we don’t have suitably effective control rods to scram the core. Lockdown is all about keeping the fuel elements sufficiently far apart so that the reaction goes sub-critical and eventually peters out (or reaches some background level).

(“Argument by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious”, so make of my words what you may.)

[tdfx]

Sure, I've actually used that analogy before myself, so I can't judge your use of it :)

My point was that in this case, people are expecting lockdown to stop the reaction entirely, when in fact the control rods are only intended to slow it down. The post I replied to seemed to believe that lockdown was intended to shorten the duration of the pandemic, when in fact it has the opposite effect (for the purpose of getting good side effects like keeping ICU beds available).