The likely death toll numbers confirmed this week by medical authorities as a result of the coronavirus pandemic are staggering.

Experts like Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci have said this week that "if we do things almost perfectly" from here on out, meaning maintaining strict social distancing for at least the next month and likely more, we will still likely see 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in this country. For context, 200,000 is about the number of U.S. soldiers who died in World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Being a contemporary of those who died in Vietnam, which included some of my high school and college classmates, I painfully remember those more than 58,000 dead U.S. soldiers and the human faces behind them. It’s still difficult for me to go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and see all the names. This death toll could be so much larger and come at a faster pace. As I said, I feel staggered by that.

The alternative — if we do nothing to mitigate this modern plague, or had we reopened everything by Easter as President Trump talked about as recently as last week — could result in 1.5 to 2.2 million deaths. That's a higher number than every U.S. soldier who has ever died in all U.S. wars put together throughout our nation's history. A University of Washington model estimates that we are still likely to see more than 1,000 people die in the U.S. every single day for the next 40 days.

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