I hope you are right.

I doubt it, though.

COVID seems to be exponentially growing in almost every state, and many states are doing nothing to suppress it.

Now the weather is turning cold, and there are Thanksgiving and Christmas to come.

Trump voters will consider it their patriotic duty to meet up for both of these holidays in large quantities, and not wear masks. Different strains of COVID from all over the country will meet up in forty million households and then fly back all over the nation.

New infections are increasing at almost exactly 4% per day on a week over week basis, and we both are expecting this number to rise until after Christmas.

Trump himself will continue to diminish and deny the problem, and continue to do everything he can to prevent a smooth transfer of power to Biden.

There are 69 days until Trump is out of office. If the current 4% rate merely stayed constant then at that point there would be over two million new cases a day. And there would still be less than 100 million Americans infected - plenty to go.

That won't happen of course - states will close down at some point even if Trump told them not to.

But it might still be enough to overwhelm the hospitals. Also, you can't underestimate burnout in hospital staff, the fact that many hospitals are simply out of money because elective surgery is where the money is for them, and the cold and flu season.

Sometime in 2021, really early we really hope!, there will be a vaccine. It will take months to roll out even with non-crazy government back in power again and compliance will be poor.

If I had to guess, I think on the order of 100 million Americans will get COVID-19 before it is officially under control, sometime late in 2021 I hope, and over 2% of them will die of it, so including the existing deaths, that will be on the order of 2.5 million deaths.

(Worse scenarios are possible, even, if you start breaking your hospitals by overloading them at 150% capacities for prolonged periods of time, which after a time will start incapacitating and even killing your medical staff. I just hope America gets it together fast enough not to do that but my discussions with you guys are not encouraging...)

Later forensic analysis will show that almost all of those deaths could have been avoided with heroic measures, and over half of them with bog-standard, regular coordination of public health measures.

My track record on COVID so far isn't great - in March I predicted (even perhaps to you?) "up to" 200,000 US deaths in 2020, with an expected 50,000.

Clearly I was too conservative, because we it blew past "expected" months ago and it's far past "up to" by October.

I did better than most though, and that's something.

Time will tell whether the "listen to the incoherent ramblings of a lying narcissist on the subject of epidemiology" strategy was really the best one, but most outside observers aren't seeing it work out well for you guys...