I find it exhausting that people such as yourself seem to latch onto missed time frames as a reason to just assume all public health policy is bullshit. Yes, because when I say I'm going to finish some software project in 2 weeks, I absolutely always get it done in 2 weeks.

These are estimates. They are sometimes (often!) wrong. Sometimes they're wrong because the problem was underestimated. Sometimes they are wrong for political reasons.

Yes, "flattening the curve" took more than 2 weeks. Big deal. Doing so did absolutely reduce pressure on ICUs and saved many lives. And hell, if everyone had actually followed all the mandates and guidelines at the time, maybe it would have only taken two weeks. But people don't, and it's always hard to gauge how many people will refuse to cooperate, and in what ways, and exactly what effect that will have.

The reason the goalposts are moving is because this isn't a well-defined game with strictly-set rules. The virus doesn't care about our rules or projections. If it mutates, and the new variant does better against our vaccines, then... yes, the goalposts will move. Our utter failure to get high vaccination rates in poorer countries is likely a big cause of the new variants. It's all well and good to be sitting in a highly-vaccinated city in the first world, but all it takes is one person to fly in from somewhere with a new variant, and you're hosed.

You miss a time frame if you say "2 weeks" and end up having to lockdown for 3 instead. If you say "2 weeks" and end up with lockdowns for years you are either incompetent or lying or both.

"Years"? We haven't even had the pandemic for "years", let alone lockdowns.

"1.5 years", nearing in on "2 years" as opposed to "1 year"

I agree, it's getting old and we want to move on.

If we look at the numbers for Germany they're now getting 60 thousand cases per day, which is three times more than any previous period.

More cases mean more people in hospitals. The situation was bad last winter, it can get worse fast. Now, of course many are vaccinated, so that drops the likelihood of hospitalization, but unfortunately for them 30% of people are still unvaccinated. So I can understand why they're nervous.

The thing about the vaccine also is that the effects drop with time unfortunately, so people need boosters. I've already gotten 3 shots and expect there will be more.

If we aren't to keep the world in lockdown, we need people to be out and about, but vaccinated, so this can truly be treated like a few bad flu years in a row.

Until the virus hopefully mutates towards a less severe thing and we can stop talking about it.

The initial estimate was that 70% of population (not only adult) would be sufficient to achieve herd immunity, but the problem is that while the initial virus had R_0 of 2-3, the Delta variant's is about 6.