I don't know how to say this without seeming like a raving alarmist or complete downer, so I'll just come right out and say it: This will not be over soon and we should be prepared for this to go until at least the end of the year.

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I know a lot of folks are saying June, and I want nothing more than to be wrong about this, but aside from a vaccine being produced, I don't see how it happens that soon.

Our response is simply too inadequate, the loss of life will be too great, and the virus will almost certainly return in some form to dampen our progress.

For some context, let's look at China, which is entering its fourth month of the crisis, still coming down from the peak in the first week of February. Let's assume the data we're getting from them is accurate (it is not). They are now 8 weeks removed from the peak...

Movie theaters are still closed, travel is still restricted, everyone is still masked up, and China is just barely starting to return to any degree of normalcy. This is following some of the most comprehensive and thorough restrictions possible.

Now I know it should go without saying, but the US is not China. While China (eventually) mounted one of the strongest possible responses to the virus, the US has mounted one of the weakest, allowing the virus to take deeper hold here than in any other country.

Packed churches in Florida, and conservatives across the country hosting "Coronavirus parties" to infect one another, are proof of how creative we're willing to be in order to feed this fire. We are weeks away from our peak and we already passed China's total death toll days ago.

By the Trump regime's *own* estimates, we will lose 200,000 people, and that assumes we undertake a serious nationwide distancing strategy that so far seems very unlikely. But let's assume we can trust the Trump regime's numbers (we cannot)...

That means this starts to wrap up around mid-June, almost 8 weeks from the peak. At that point we can *start* to think about rolling back some of these precautions. Maybe playgrounds can be open again, small family gatherings might be allowed. No games, movies, concerts, malls.

And that's just logistics. If we believe the numbers we're being fed, by mid-June this country will have lost 200,000 people. That's 200,000 people who died alone, who never had funerals, whose families were never allowed to come together to grieve, come to terms, and rebuild.

We will be a deeply traumatized country by then, and that is on top of the trauma many of our communities already suffer from. That's to say nothing about the trauma of healthcare workers, being asked to do the impossible for months on end. We will be scared, untrusting and lost.

Where will we be a couple months from then? The end of a Summer spent social distancing and trying to put back together the pieces of our communities, rebuilding what we can and starting anew where we need to. And then what?

Do we send kids to school the first week of September? When the CDC and most experts believe we will see a resurgence of the virus in the Fall? Will we be eager to do that after losing so many people just a few months earlier?

But even if we hold back kids and we don't restart life as usual, even if we keep relaxed distancing in place, the virus will almost certainly still resurface again in the Fall.

And it seems reasonable to assume that we'll lock down again when that happens, hopefully sooner than last time so we can avoid the massive loss of life we're seeing right now. But how long does that go on? Do we have an election in November?

What are we willing to risk in order to spend the holidays with family and friends? How does this end before the end of the year? I don't believe it does.

If you're still reading this, you might think I'm being over-the-top, a fatalist or alarmist, divorced from reality. I might be wrong... But so far, as this crisis has unfolded, I have not been.

I believe we need to start being real about what we're facing, acknowledging the fact that our response has been inadequate at every turn so far, and understanding the scale of the response this will require as it stretches into the end of the year.

A $1,200 stimulus check, a rent moratorium, waiving a few fees... None of this is going to cut it, and the more we try to stretch ourselves under this absurd austerity, the more we risk resentment and desperation igniting the civil war that is already bubbling under us.

Assuming no vaccine is created, this is a *best case scenario* that assumes we can collectively act responsibly to minimize the loss of life. A week ago, our president and the media that props him up, were floating the idea of ending isolation less than two weeks from now.

The political will we will need, just to keep this train on the tracks (let alone feed and house people) is astounding. If we hope to survive, we need to start building and nurturing that political will right now, and that starts by acknowledging just how far we have left to go.