Donald Trump's answer on how the Covid-19 pandemic will end is, um, not comforting

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/16/politics/donald-trump-covid-19-coronavirus-abc-townhall/index.html

 During a town hall on ABC Tuesday night, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked President Donald Trump why he said that he liked to "downplay" the threat posed by Covid-19 to the American public.

Here's the exchange that followed:

Trump: I'm not looking to be dishonest. I don't want people to panic. And we are going to be OK. We're going to be OK, and it is going away. And it's probably going to go away now a lot faster because of the vaccines.

It would go away without the vaccine, George, but it's going to go away a lot faster with it.

Stephanopoulos: It would go away without the vaccine?

 If Trump was referring to herd immunity when it comes to the number of people getting the virus, well, then he was talking about a massive loss of human life -- well in excess of the 400,000+ American deaths that one oft-cited model is projecting by January 1, 2021.

Almost 6 million deaths. And 60% of the population getting Covid is the low end of what experts estimate is necessary for her immunity to be achieved. The Mayo Clinic, for example, estimated that 70% of Americans would have to contract and then recover from Covid-19 in order for herd immunity to be achieved. That would mean 229 million cases and, with the death rate at 2.96%, about 6.8 million Americans dead from Covid-19 before herd immunity was achieved. That's more than 10 times the number of Americans killed in the Civil War.