Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
The starting point against which to set expectations is that the polling has for the past year been pretty consistent with a Biden victory in the low-50s over Trump in the mid-40s, with very little variation. And that was before the pandemic. There's your nail upon which to hang any revision or update, and the few unpredictable* factors that have the potential to detectably influence the distribution of votes (assuming a Trump-Biden race) are a phenomenal economic rebound into Q4, or the descent of a new wave of COVID around election day. (Which is why we need national mail-in voting legislation.)
The only way we could have moved past COVID-19 by election day was if we put no measures in place and let the virus cull millions of people at once.
They are now predicting 60,000 deaths by August instead of 100k-250k, which is good if it holds true. But we are still a long way away from a vaccine and there are millions of susceptible people that can only be isolated for so long.
We will either have to maintain a limited social life for over a year which will make many resentful of the administration, or we will relax measures and risk overloading the health care system for a second time.

At the end of the day, we won't be able to remove this virus from the population at large until a vaccine is made. We are flattening the curve but there will still be a consistent level of new infections that continue to kill a percentage of the nations elderly (and younger compromised people) for months, if not through 2021.

There's roughly 48 million Americans who are over the age of 65. Assume that after relaxing measures that the health care system is not over loaded, and even better, able to bring the death rate for that demographic from 15% down to 5%.
We would still expect to see 2.4 million deaths from COVID-19 assuming everyone is exposed eventually.