“hoping against hope”
OK, we know these arguments have been shown to be wishful thinking:
1. Warm weather will kill CV
2. “Only” a small percent of population is vulnerable
Are there any legitimate arguments for why this epidemic may end sooner and be less dangerous than we (rational Americans) fear?
Unfortunately, the flu bro’s teams of “experts” seem to make the rookie mistake of focusing on death rates while ignoring hospitalization and ICU rates.
They then fail to correctly calculate even the death rates by failing to take into account the unresolved current cases—which by definition may be future deaths.
They also fail to understand what happens when health care systems get overwhelmed—since deaths from non CV diseases will easily exceed CV deaths in that circumstance.
They also confuse total numbers for a year with a spike in numbers for a week or a month.
If CV cases were spread out over a year they would be much more manageable—unfortunately the virus does not play fair.
They also rely too heavily on low death rates from younger people while ignoring the hospitalization rates for those same people.
They also ignore the length of hospital stay for CV patients vs flu or other patients.
They rely too heavily on cooked data like that from China—garbage data in, garbage results out...
etc etc etc
3. The development of an effective drug, treatment or vaccine.
It's not likely to end sooner, but like other countries, we are taking actions to make it less dangerous. Barring effective drugs or treatments, "less dangerous" is still going to be about 2% mortality among those who become ill. Like every other country that has seen large numbers of infections, we face a difficult long term fight to prevent clusters from becoming new outbreaks. Right now, 2% of a small number is probably our best case, and 5% or more of a very large number our worst case, meaning we failed.
There are some who think that the actual infection rate is so high that a large percentage of us are already recovered and immune, but there is no evidence of that. A lot of people are citing a British paper that makes that case, but that paper was not based on evidence, but a theory. Not a single person was tested for antibodies or immune response. It's possible, but not something I would base any public health policy or planning on.
You left off the race-based, Silk Road and gender arguments.