January will be the worst single month I bet.
Despite knowing a hundred times more about infectious diseases and how best to limit the reach of an epidemic or pandemic than we did in 1918, COVID-19 will have killed as many people in this country as the Spanish flu did in 1918-1919 by the time this peters out (hopefully) by the end of 2021. We will almost certainly be one of the very few countries (possibly the only country) where that is true.
If the Biden administration can figure out an effective way to ramp up the manufacture, distribution and application of the various vaccines, we could have this under control by summer. The issue is that 40% of this country will absolutely refuse to let the federal government tell them what to do. And once again, a minority of the country will be responsible for the continued, needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
I have asked this question over and over and over and over, but why are we allowing this to happen? Had some country full of brown people with funny sounding names attacked us in a more conventional sense and killed 1000s of Americans over a period of just a few days, the response would have been overwhelming. In a way, coronavirus has BEEN our civil war. Most of the 350,000+ that have died are needless casualties of a civil war that has been brewing in this country for a generation. The right in this country has attacked us, and inflicted enormous harm, both in terms of blood and treasure. I don't think there is any other way of viewing this pandemic, at least within the confines of our country.
COVID-19 was going to kill a lot of Americans. It was going to like a bad flu season on steroids. With all of the built in weaknesses and failings of our healthcare system I would not have been surprised under the best of circumstances to have seen 100,000 Americans succumb over a period of 12-18 months. But not the 500,000 or more we are likely to see by the time the weather warms up and we should be enjoying the coming summer. That's more Americans than in both world wars combined. And yet the only enemy casualties so far have been the ones who, also coincidentally, succumbed to the virus. What a shame.