The very same scientists who loudly proclaimed 3 million would die in the US are now furiously backpedaling in an attempt to rewrite their own history.
Yep. backpedaling.
Nobody said 3 million. There was one model early in the pandemic (when most of the information we had was either lies from the Chinese or data coming in from hot zones in Italy where the hospitals were overwhelmed) that said if absolutely nothing changed at all (no change in behavior, no protective measures whatsoever, no social distancing, literally doing nothing about the novel coronavirus), uncontrolled spread could result in as many as 2.2 million deaths in the US.
2 things changed since then: we got actual data on the mortality rate to replace China’s lies, and we changed behavior which slowed the spread (talking here about social distancing; the lockdowns don’t appear to have done anything good at all). The CATO Institute has an article all about the model here: https://www.cato.org/blog/how-one-model-simulated-22-million-us-deaths-covid-19
It’s simple math really. They assumed (based on the R0 numbers available at the time) 81% infection before herd immunity and (just under) 0.9% mortality rate. That means 267 million Americans catch it and 2.2 million die. If we use the latest CDC numbers based on what’s been observed in the US over the past three months, we can expect the actual numbers (assuming no vaccine or improved treatments) to give us around 231 million infected before herd immunity is reached and 600,000 - 750,000 dead. Again, that’s assuming no vaccine and no improvement in treatment. So that initial model isn’t actually that crazy. It looks crazy because it’s based on some early data that wasn’t refined and it looks at the whole pandemic from start to finish. We’re looking at the first 3 months alone and assuming that’s all there will ever be. We’re at 113,000 dead now, probably about 143,000 by August. If this picks back up again in the fall/winter, those numbers will begin to rise quickly again. Hopefully we have a working vaccine available by then. I know President Trump is pushing hard for that behind the scenes and working to make sure it’s available to Americans as soon as possible.