Fair enough. I guess hoping it doesn't go up is certainly reasonable. You'd like to think they'd be educated leaps of faith though, which i'm sure they are.
an educated guess is still a guess.
evidence is best and even the evidence isn't fully supportive yet. The evidence from Denmark would suggest you can keep it below one. Germany are anxious that it has gone above one. This virus is absolutely confounding the scientific community at every turn. As soon as one thing is assumed it is nullified or counter evidence is shown.
My thoughts on it are as follows
Get same day test/trace/isolate procedures in place
Get antibody testing set up to determine the true (or as close as possible) number of people who've been infected
Get scientific consensus that immunity is in fact possible (there is some anecdotal evidence that people are infected multiple times)
Have clearly defined and communicated metrics for releasing/imposing measures based on critical care capacity and assumed r0
In Ireland we've bought time by having lockdowns but haven't seemed to achieve any of the above. Our testing is still laggy, some people are still waiting a week for results. Which is absolutely ridiculous. If all of the above were in place or known then you could, with some degree of confidence, get to a South Korea level of life, where most things are open, albeit with strict guidelines in place for social behavior.