>In 2030, we'll look back at this as a time for overreaction and mass hysteria

Well no actually. We'll look back on this as a time of mass stupidity, selfishness, racist/classist politics.

Had Trump just followed the Bush/Cheney pandemic plan, and listened to the CDC, before they were all threatened with termination. We could have easily got control of this back in January, instead we decided that the virus was a hoax, or just like the flu, or was easily handled, etc. So we are now stuck in this yo-yo pattern.

We semi lock down, everyone gets tired of wearing masks and limiting contact the state opens up; the cases flare up, the hospitals start to fill and the state semi-lock down again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

20% of the cases are severe, and 5% are critical, if we follow your plan and just open things up, hospitals quickly get overwhelmed. Mississippi has 10,000 hospital beds for 3 Million citizens, in July when things were good Mississippi almost ran out of ICU beds, and were quickly running out of beds (1).

I would like to see your plan for developing herd immunity quickly, which for COVID is close 80% infected and hopefully immune. When you talk abut herd immunity I'm assuming you want it to happen quickly because we are on a slow path to herd immunity. The only way to herd immunity quickly would be to remove all restrictions, no masks, no social distancing, no restriction of gathering size, back to normal.

For Mississippi, only 10K hospital beds for 3 Million people. For herd immunity, 2.4 Million people will get infected, 480,000 will require hospitalization. With all restriction removed we should see a similar pattern of infections like we do with the flu. So the majority of cases will happen in Dec, Jan, the peak in Feb, and Mar, the breakdown is about Dec (20%), Jan(20%), Feb(40%), Mar(20%) The average COVID hospital stay is 3 weeks(2), for young people it's actually longer than for old people.

In December we'll see 96,000 cases needing hospitalization, give or take, 10X the number of beds, and those cases will be there for 3/4 of the month which means for the rest of the herd immunity event about 400,000 people won't be hospitalized. What do you think happens to the death rate when people need to be in the hospital for 3 weeks don't go to the hospital? Yeah, they die. What do you think happens to households that have COVID patients who should be in the hospital but can't go to the hospital.

Once hospitals get overwhelmed the death rate will skyrocket, about 13% of Mississippi's population will die to achieve quick herd immunity, kind of looks like the Spanish flu numbers doesn't it? Frankly we'd be better off to not admit anyone who has COVID, at lease the hospitals would still be able to function for normal issues.

Let's not forget about the flu, because that will be raging at the same time, I bet getting the flu and COVID at the same will be really bad, so how many people who get mild flu and mild COVID will require hospitalization, but it won't really matter because there won't be any room anyway.

Now lets imagine this event playing out all across the country, that will be mass hysteria.

(1)https://www.modernhealthcare.com/hospitals/mississippis-five...

(2)https://www.kpcnews.com/covid-19/article_8ab408ad-8fb0-5f74-...