The people organizing our response don't think this is the end, by any stretch. It's our first wave. Each wave will hit us harder going forward, as we ramp up our health care response and allow more of the economy to function. I don't know that we'll get to 1.5M, but it's hard to see how we'll avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths unless we keep the economy on total lockdown for 18 months, which seems impossible and self-defeating.

Each wave will get harder to control, IMO, with the country poorer and in greater and greater debt, and the people will become exhausted from the measures.

This is just a guess. Let's see how long it takes to get down the back side of this curve, whether we get some newer and more effective treatments, etc., and hope for the best case scenarios to play out.