The Country Could Go Even More Viral

As the US is now coming up on 200,000 COVID-19 deaths with no end in sight and a Trump regime that could not care less about the death toll other than to blame Joe Biden for it somehow, the medical community is sounding the alarm that flu season could bring another 200,000 deaths by the end of 2020.

The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic could triple by year’s end, with an additional 1.9 million deaths, while a fall wave of infections could drive fatalities in the United States to 410,000, according to a new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The estimate reinforces warnings by many experts that cooler, drier weather and increased time spent indoors could boost viral transmission in the Northern Hemisphere surge this fall and winter — something typically seen with other respiratory viruses.

The institute’s forecasts were influential earlier in the pandemic in guiding policies developed by the White House coronavirus task force, but they have been criticized by some experts as projecting further into the future than can be done reliably.

The U.S. death toll from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, now stands at 183,000, according to health data analyzed by The Washington Post. The IHME model projects that under the most likely scenario, 410,451 people in the United States will have died by Jan. 1.

The best-case scenario is 288,381 deaths and worst-case is 620,029, that model forecasts.
The scenarios pivot on human behavior and public policy. The best-case scenario would result from near-universal mask-wearing and the maintenance of social distancing and government mandates limiting the size of indoor gatherings. The worst-case scenario assumes that people and their communities stop taking precautions.

“It’s easy given the summer lull to think the epidemic is going away,” Christopher Murray, director of IHME, said Friday on a conference call. But there are “bleak times ahead in the Northern Hemisphere winter, and unfortunately we are not collectively doing everything we can to learn from the last five months.”

I'd actually dispute that last paragraph: the Trump regime has already learned the only applicable lesson from the last five months, and the lesson is "America becoming a white fascist ethnostate has already been worth the cost of 200,000 lives".

The fact that Trump still has a real shot at victory is precisely because of tens of millions of voters who are 100% okay with the last four years as long as Black and brown America is relegated to second-class citizenship, beneath even the poorest, least-educated, least-powerful white Trump supporter.

And the fact of the matter is when the electorate is still 70% white, and the population is far more so  in battleground states like Wisconsin (87%), Michigan (80%), Pennsylvania (82%) and Florida (78%), it's up to white voters in mostly white states to decide the presidency and it always has been.

We got lucky with Obama because white voters figured he was one of the "good ones". In 2014, that ended permanently with Trayvon Martin and Obama's support for Black Lives Matter.  It helped cost Hillary the election, with nearly six percent of voters choosing a third party.

Remember, your Trump-supporting friends are okay with this.

Those of us who are left have to try to save ourselves.

And another 200,000 of us aren't going to be saved, frankly.