Agree with "herd immunity strategy by default". Absent a vaccine, about the same percentage of people will become sick, while a larger percentage is exposed but does not become sick. At some point, again minus a vaccine, few enough people will be left as potential replicating hosts, that the virus will not be replicating fast enough to maintain the country's epidemic. Countries will differ by the breadth of the curve, but not the area under it (adjusted per-capita of course). On the other hand, if you are one of the countries with a long curve, and an effective vaccine arrives before the end of it, you benefit.

What countries are actually following a strategy to reach herd immunity by having "enough" people fall ill and hopefully recover (having "recovered" does not preclude persisting damages btw!)?

Most countries are rather waiting for a vaccine to become available and try to minimize the number of sick and dead in the meantime without interfering with economy too much.

(54.4k was number of newly confirmed cases on friday 10/2 by the John-Hopkins University btw. I'm aware that the US has inadequate testing [0] and that the real number is going to be a lot higher than this.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#the-positive-... )

A vaccine is unlikely to wipe out the virus for good. They just aren't that effective. We can't wipe out other coronaviruses or the common cold by vaccination even if we wanted to.

It will continue to circulate in the population, just in a less explosive manner. This also means it is possible we will never reach herd immunity in some absolute sense much like we haven't for other coronaviruses.

Only New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and maybe a couple other countries are actively avoiding herd immunity. Regardless of their public statements, other countries aren't actually trying to minimize the number of sick and dead. The public health measures in place are generally insufficient to contain the pandemic, so I predict that many areas will reach a significant level of herd immunity before a safe and effective vaccine is widely available. We won't know whether that prediction is accurate until about a year from now.