If our mindset had been "zero covid", we'd not have gotten the mutants and the v1 vaccine would have driven it extinct. Please dont abuse the name of a strateg

If our mindset had been "zero covid", we'd not have gotten the mutants and the v1 vaccine would have driven it extinct. Please dont abuse the name of a strategy that was never implemented. What governments did was 'keep incidence below X by means of lockdowns', and 'relax restrictions if incidence is below X'. This is a simple control system that keeps the incidence at X. Not below X. Unfortunately X was chosen via hospital bed capacity, so it was quite high, about 500 cases / 100k per week. High enough to generate mutants. With X=5, the same lockdown measures would have been in effect for much the same time (they'd have been started a few weeks earlier). Also, for very low values of X, you might have been able to get away with just contact tracing or travel controls instead of lockdowns, so the average lockdown intensity over time, under zero covid, could have been lower than what we had. The point of zero covid is to have less lockdown! Anyway, the idea was to buy time until you get the vaccine. Zero covid was never intended to be an indefinite duration program. This is what zero covid really means (low X). I agree with everything else you said.