Stay strong, don't panic: New infection rates WILL increase as society reopens

The headlines today are filled with discussion of how, as certain states are relieving full-on quarantine, officials are paranoid that new infection rates appear to be rising again.

Wow, real shocker here.

They "flattened the curve" by quarantine. Surprise! That doesn't kill the virus off. It just reduces the new infection rate until you let people out of quarantine. Then the infection rate goes up again until you achieve herd immunity. (And let's be clear: herd immunity will just flatten the new infection rate, not eliminate new infections).

This is not rocket science. This is not even a difficult concept for those who show up to class at any college. (Which suggests what most reporters must not have been doing in college.)

There are only three possibilities:

1. The virus dies out on its own (with warm weather or whatever). There's little evidence of this.
2. You kill off the virus with drugs. We don't have these and almost certainly will not for at least another year.
3. New infections will continue at an elevated rate until you reach herd immunity, and will continue (but at an attenuated rate) until the vast majority of the population has developed immunity. 

So you locked people up and now you're relaxing those restrictions and new infection rates are rising. 

No Shinola, Sherlock. 

How population immunity works. Left:
Before appreciable immunity. Right: after
appreciable infection/immunity.
White: uninfected. Red: Active infections.
Blue: Immune. The white circles are the at-risk
population. You don't want a white circle near
a red (infectious) circle. As the population
becomes more fully immune, the chances of a red
circle near a white one decrease. 

At the end of the day, until/unless we develop effective drugs (at least a year out, in the best scenario), most people can expect to be exposed to the virus. Most will show few/any symptoms. Some will get very sick but recover at home. A small number will wind up in the hospital, and some of those will die. This is the unfortunate reality of viruses, and the best we can do, until effective treatment is available, is to work to keep the most vulnerable (> age 75 and those with certain risk factors) safe. It's the same thing we do for the flu, which also kills tens of thousands of Americans per year.

Stop worrying about the number of new infections. You aren't going to stop the virus cold by quarantine. Instead, consider whether the tradeoff of quarantine and a decimated economy is really saving any lives at all.