I have to admit that being home taking care of 3 kids I have not been able to keep up with the latest info. But I struggle to understand why there is a lot of focus on preventing cases. Is it not the case that unless there is a vaccine (not likely to be soon available for the masses), Beside quarantine the only thing that will prevent second waves is to have a big part of society immune (~60%)?

I’m not sure this is true or not, but if so would it not make more sense to focus on relationship between cases and the health care where those cases happen? E.i. that health care is not overwhelmed.

To list a few: to not overwhelm the health system for one (avoiding having high number of people to take care of simultaneously) , also avoid spreading to at risk population, especially given the high ratio of asymptomatic cases and, well, generally avoid deaths.

Past a point, tracing is probably quite difficult to do I imagine

(at home with 2 kids here, including a 3mo)

These graphs are nice but they don't account for differences in testing strategy. You can't compare countries that did nearly 1mio tests vs ones that did barely 50k. Some will show basically just confirmed cases post hospital admissions + tracing, while others run massive testing campaigns.

I’m mostly confused by comparing number of cases / deaths between countries without more context. Seems very useless to me.

I think they are comparing hospital deaths in all of them, so a bit more comparable. Number of tests and detected cases will obviously vary more. All the stats on this kind of timescale are a bit tricky though