That is based on the premise that less restrictions are better for an economy. That isn't necessarily the case though. If people are scared to go out it doesn't matter if places are legally allowed to open or not. Also sustained moderate restrictions might be worse than a short term period of harsh restrictions. Better to bring cases down a low level, build consumer confidence, then use your R budget.

But the error bars on that R value are big enough that you should be very cautious. Both due to statistical noise and potential systematic error. If you see a range of 0.9-1.1, should you act like it's around 1? It might be prudent to inflate the figure by some amount.

You can't work at getting a balance unless someone does a detailed cost/benefit analysis. I've seen no such thing. In Britain supposedly highly educated people in government and the civil service have been acting it seems, on whim and dodgy statistics which have been utterly refuted by respected independent academics. I suspect that many thinking people in the UK would concur with the view that sections of their government would be hard put to it to run a drinks party in a brewery.

There was a paper that came out of Germany earlier this year that said the optimum replication rate in terms of keeping the economy going was 0.63. This idea that there is a trade off between health and business is false.