The thing about some of these death count projections is that they all assume we eventually get down to ~0, and that is very unlikely to happen (until therapies/vaccines/herd immunity).
The US and most other countries will likely tolerate some baseline level of deaths to open their countries back up. How high? I don't know. But say the US gets down to 1/5 of the current levels and hold there for 6 months until effective treatments lower the IFR, so 300-400/day…
I think a lot of governors would tolerate that. It actually seems marginally optimistic, if anything. There's a lot of talk about opening up in places where death counts are currently higher on a per capita basis. That's still an additional 50K-70K deaths in the "plateau" phase.
