actually, i'd say you're looking at at least 200,000 deaths in the united states as a best case scenario, with potentially as many as a million.
but, i don't think these hippie measures are grounded in science - that's just herd immunity.
i'm not arguing against the fascist lockdowns because i think the economy is more important than health, i'm pointing out that there's no reasonable expectation that they're going to work, and presenting you with a more realistic and, what i think is inevitable, number, instead.
we need to get away from this idea that we're in control; we're not, and, if there's anything positive that comes out of this, let us hope that it is a tendency to relinquish control more readily to science, to logic and to randomness.
maybe this will act as our collective exit from the era of classical science and into the era of modern science, where we no longer pretend we are at the top of some kind of hierarchy, or that we are here to protect the earth, as we have since the days of aristotle, but instead understand our need to see ourselves as equal with the other life forms on this planet, in a web rather than a chain, and in a relationship of mutual need rather than one of dominance or extraction. this is a myth that the science has let go of, but that the culture trails behind on, often reinforced by a religion that crowns us as special, as different.
we're not special. we're not different....
this shift in mindset away from anthropic dominance and towards a concept of ecological interdependence is necessary if we wish to survive the rest of the century. it will be resisted, but such resistance is futile; the other option is extinction.
there's a lot more people that are going to die from this, and there's nothing that can be done or could have been done or even should have been done about it.
it's too late to do the things we could have done that would have mattered.