Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The question on everybody’s minds: How bad will this really ge…

There are certainly numbers out there. Trouble is, they’re kind of all over the place. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is using models that forecast a best-case scenario in which about 200,000 Americans die, according to reporting by The New York Times. Meanwhile, a report from Imperial College London that made headlines for its dire, modeling-based forecasts predicted about 2.2 million U.S. deaths from the coronavirus, if nobody changes their everyday behavior.

That is, to put it mildly, a freaking huge spread — the difference between a death toll on par with the number of people who die from...

Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The question on everybody’s minds: How bad will this really ge…

There are certainly numbers out there. Trouble is, they’re kind of all over the place. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is using models that forecast a best-case scenario in which about 200,000 Americans die, according to reporting by The New York Times. Meanwhile, a report from Imperial College London that made headlines for its dire, modeling-based forecasts predicted about 2.2 million U.S. deaths from the coronavirus, if nobody changes their everyday behavior.

That is, to put it mildly, a freaking huge spread — the difference between a death toll on par with the number of people who die from injury and violence annually in the U.S. and one that’s closer to the number of people murdered when the Chinese communists moved to suppress counterrevolutionaries between 1950 and 1953. It is, in other words, the difference between a number we routinely live with, and one that changes a country forever.

So why is that gap so wide?...