I think you just devalued your argument.
R0 may be a weak theoretical construct, but saying that it's also contextual and not inherent to the virus doesn't do much to clear things up.
Rt is simply notation of an estimate of R0 at a particular time.
Either way, you're correct that "herd immunity", as used here, means the point at which time the infection rate begins to decline, and this is conditional on population behaviors. If people mix more freely, the estimate changes.
However, the observation that people don't mix uniformly still applies, even if they mix a bit more than they do now. To put it in a CS context, it's like debating the magnitude of the constant, when the algorithm has a fundamentally different asymptotic behavior.
From Wikipedia: In epidemiology, the basic reproduction number, or basic reproductive number (sometimes called basic reproduction ratio or basic reproductive rate), denoted {\displaystyle R_{0}}R_{0} (pronounced R nought or R zero),[20] of an infection can be thought of as the expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to infection.
Yeah, and that is contextual number, determined by population behavior and other factors.
Yes, population immunity should not be on that list, but the population behavior, weatcher and what not are still influencing it a lot.
This isn't a political statement of any sort.
In any case, it's not relevant to my point: R0 is a contextual number, always defined by empirical data. It's not a fixed feature of the virus.
Yep. Here's a very approachable and well written paper on the topic: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/52/7/911/299077
And my comment on it from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22818413
This seems like something you made up. Can you cite your source?
How exactly does your rule apply to non-humans? What "health measures" do packs of wild horses take when disease comes to the herd?
Edit: removed wrong information on R0 that's not really essential to my point