A number of countries have most of their populations under what is effectively house arrest

Meanwhile, the virus still permeates, those same populations' collective immunity has barely changed, and we're only marginally closer to a vaccine

The fundamentals won't have changed when we do get around to removing the lockdowns

Whether the virus is permeating is the point. If the virus has broadly spread across society, and it sounds like we're agreed that it has, then you have to normalize by population to get useful numbers.