Right now the Johns Hopkins website says that something more than a half million Americans are confirmed to have Covid-19 infections. That is about one-third of one percent of Americans, but still a lot of people. How many have actually had infections without symptoms, or with mild symptoms that they didn't bother to report to a hospital (I have two neighbors like that,) nobody knows.
Here's where I get political. I think the media mostly comes out of New York and to a lesser extent, LA, where the virus is either peaking or where strict controls have kept the infections on a manageable plateau. Their heavy "coastal" coverage gives the impression that we're coming out of this -- but we're not. Remember that this whole episode started with a few dozen confirmed infections in February and exploded to a half-million now. But because of economic pressures, and because Trump is dumber than a barrel of hair, he is not only going to open the economy, he's going to claim the right to open it nationwide [edit: actually, I see he's actually done this], over-running the governors who were the ones who closed it. So he's gong to open the economy, and now we'll be starting with tens of thousands of infections, instead of the few we started with in February. Once we start opening the economy, that decision will be hard to reverse and it will go on for at least a month or maybe two, when the infection rate will become overwhelming and deaths will skyrocket. At that point, Trump will have to either close the economy down tight again, and right up to the election, or he'll have to leave it open and accept the deaths, which will continue to rise right up to the election. He could avoid much of this by keeping the economy closed down until July or August, but he won't; or, he could "allow" the governors to reopen on their own initiative, so if things go wrong, he could blame them. But that's not what's he's going to do. He's going to want to get all the credit for reopening, and what he's going to get is all the blame.
I agree with everyone who thinks Joe Biden is a weak candidate and lacks dynamism, but I think Trump is going to have a disaster on his hands that he made himself, and will have killed perhaps a hundred thousand people who didn't have to die. One possible big change in all of this is if the Oxford vaccine truly turns out to work, and if people can start getting vaccinated in October. That might brighten things a bit, but I doubt it will save Trump.
