Measles R0 is 12-15 we never shut the nation down.
Measles was a childhood disease.
Most everyone over 15 had had it.
It was endemic.
This is an epidemic.
Nobody has immunity, there is no vaccine.
“Measles R0 is 12-15 we never shut the nation down.”
We have an effective vaccine. You needed it to even go to public school, even though as a childhood disease it was not particularly deadly (0.01% for children). In the population at large it has the same lethality as the flu - yet every child is required to be vaccinated for it.
When CCP-19 is a childhood disease and/or we have an effective vaccine that every child is required to take as an infant, you might make the comparison.
Additionally, there are issues with asymptomatic transmission of CCP-19, where it is rare to nonexistent among those infected with measles.
As for the R0 of any disease, above a certain point it doesn’t really matter. Exponentially infecting an entire population in days or weeks or even months is still too much for our HCS to handle.
Imagine if measles appeared for the first time now. No immunity and a very high transmission rate. I suspect we’d take similar measures. Prior to the vaccination program (1963) there were only half a million cases of measles annually - due to large scale herd immunity and the much slower and lower levels of mass transit. About 400 to 500 deaths per year resulted. Affecting the usual victims most - some of the very young and a lot of the old and typically killing indirectly by suppressing the immune systems of its victims and thus allowing secondary infections like pneumonia to do the dirty work.
We have about that many cases of CCP-19 in the US right now (confirmed, never mind the uncounted asymptomatics and those still incubating) and over 30 times as many deaths already. More people died in NYC today than from an entire year of measles in the whole country prior to the vaccine.
It’s not the measles, either.
Almost all adults were immune to measles, thus no adults became sick. Other than a few kids staying home from school with their mother (who was immune), there was no reason to "shut down the nation". There was no interruption to daily business because no one in business was ill or at risk of becoming ill.
You wanted your kids to have measles between 5 and 15 years old because it was much worse as an adult. People litterally ensured their kids got the measles, even having "measles parties" when one child was infected so the rest would get it and become immune. Measles was never a massive outbreak, and at any particular time there were relatively few people infected. COVID-19 is killing more Americans every day than Measles killed in a year.
Back in the 1800’s we absolutely shut down large swaths of the nation. It was a different world.