From The CDC (check back later and the numbers will be higher). Covid-19 deaths:
129,811
And yet there's this from the NY Times:
President Trump dismissed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States over the weekend, downplaying the impact of the disease and saying that while the testing of tens of millions of American had identified many cases, “99 percent” of them were “totally harmless.”
And:
Experts say the president appears to have seized only on a death rate estimate of 1 percent or less that does not capture the entire impact of the disease, and excludes a multitude of thousands who have spent weeks in the hospital or weeks at home with mild to moderate symptoms that still caused debilitating health problems.
And then there's this:
Rush Limbaugh advised young people to ignore calls for social distancing, telling his audience they should "go out and live their lives" and "spread herd immunity..." His fan are probably stupid enough to believe him! https://t.co/tpqMzANMDQ
— John Dean (@JohnWDean) July 7, 2020
We've seen this locally:
We understand what happens with coronavirus. People get sick. But people need to be exposed. We need to all become immune to this thing. Stop saying (she uses air quotes here) we need a vaccine, OK? We have a flu vaccine and only half the people get it. So everyone's going to rush out and get this vaccine? C'mon.
That's our very own angel of death, KDKA Radio's Wendy Bell. In the amount of time it will take for the necessary number of people to be infected so that "herd immunity" to be a defense, a half million people will be dead.
But even that might be a problem. From Mayo Clinic:
However, there are some major problems with relying on community infection to create herd immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19. First, it isn't yet clear if infection with the COVID-19 virus makes a person immune to future infection.
And half a million dead US Citizens is still OK with them.