Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
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.
With 16K+ officially-attributed deaths so far, I wouldn't be surprised if we've already approaching 60K direct fatalities. If, a year from now, analyses estimate 60K by the beginning of April, I wouldn't be shocked either.

Watch the South in the coming weeks. You're going to see thousands of deaths at home, and the hospital systems there have taken few steps to expand their already-dismal capacity. Unfortunately the odds are strong of at least a plurality of those victims being black.