Look, pretty much every statement you're making shows a strong deficiency in basic concepts. But clearly you're not stupid. Your grasp on the superficial value of the information suggests your intelligent. Go read a few dozen hours on virology or biology if you want to be better informed.

Reddit is not a good medium for disagreement. It's exhausting to try to change people's minds over this platform, it doesn't work. Our emotional connection to eachother is too loose, you'll never be convinced by me. Your first principles are too week for me to instruct you, I believe.

But you asked and you're currently being cordial so, there's an important technical difference in how you described the infection rate and what it actually means.

The r value is the number of people. Who each person will infect absent immunity or any controls. But it's a statistical number that isn't rawly determined as "each person will get this many people sick."

Honestly it's an abstract statistical modeling number. It's more important to make decisions on what informs the number than how you responded to it. Honestly they way you mentioned it in conversation was just poor use of the number. A stats course could help you use statistics in conversation less awkwardly.