This is looking less and less likely. With increasing evidence that the infection fatality rate is 0.6%, and that the herd immunity threshold may be somewhere around 30% infected, it's more like 700k. Still catastrophe, but 1/4th the catastrophe you imply...

> All our government has asked of us, begrudgingly, is to stay inside for a while, and we can’t even do that without whining.

I favored sheltering before everyone else. It was a good way to blunt the incident wave of the epidemic and prevent health care overload.

At this point, Rt with the current intervention isn't low enough to ever get us to a regime of extreme containment in any reasonable/attainable amount of time, and there's too many jurisdictions that are hotbeds of the virus that will just reintroduce it. I am not convinced that the current strategy saves lives in the long term.

It even risks backing us into a corner, where we have no choice but to reopen more than we'd like, and then face a devastating fall season with little population immunity and no seasonal factors on our side. Especially in locations like the SF Bay Area, under the nation's strictest health order but also with a very low per capita case load.

Worse, it's hard to be sure the intervention is even effective. Looking at data series on https://rt.live , there's no obvious inflection or discontinuity relating to sheltering or relaxing of sheltering in the individual states' series. Rt was falling before sheltering, and continued to fall at a comparable rate afterwards...