It's not at all absurd. Napkin math: 1% fatality rate * 60% infection rate * 7.8 billion people = 46.8 million deaths. You can plug in all sorts of adjustments, but millions is totally plausible.

Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-ne...

The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider:

In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798.

In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled.

So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this:

  In 5 days: 77,596
  In 10 days: 155,192
  In 15 days: 310,384
  In 20 days: 620,768
  In 25 days: 1,241,536

Unless things change really really quickly.

The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.

Mitigations in the US are taking too long. A lot of people are going to die.

Yes.