1) The healthcare system barely handled the load, and that was with heroic efforts to reposition ventilators and build up temporary capacity. We barely handled it because most of the country was not nearly as hard hit, so we could still shift resources around. If everywhere was hit this hard at the same time, that would be a different story. It would need to be spread out more than you imply if we wanted to have all of the country trying to stay just below capacity.

2) New York City has lost .2% of their entire population to get to that ~20% number. Extrapolated out, that's once again back to the 1-2 million deaths range for the country to hit herd immunity.

The healthcare system most places in the US is essentially a ghost town with nearly empty hospitals. NYC is an outlier in every way.

There's no way that it will reach 1-2 million.

My guess is that it will be the same thing like swine flu 10 years ago. The media will print out a sensationalized number, and the real numbers will end up being 10x fewer when calculated honestly.

The 2009 H1N1 Pandemic killed in the ballpark of 10k people in the US. I don't recall ever seeing mainstream news outlets reporting in the ballpark of 100k recorded deaths.

It's been 7 weeks since the Imperial College model that predicted up to 2.2 million deaths in the US, that used an infection fatality rate of 0.9% as an assumption. The best science still has us in the 0.5% to 1% range for IFR, still putting us in the 1-2 million range if let ourselves get to herd immunity levels without a vaccine.

I think we'll avoid getting to 1-2 million, but it'll be because we take actions along the way to push some/most infections to post-vaccine or post-effective treatments.

> Try to reach it without a vaccine, and millions will die.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/sunday/coronaviru...

We are going to have nowhere near 1-2 million deaths from this. and the IFR range is around 0.2%, not 0.5 - 1%.

And of course we will get herd immunity soon, with the way exponentials work. We are re-opening the economy! We will reach herd immunity far quicker than we will get a vaccine.

> My guess is…

What a well reasoned rebuttal.