Johnson, as quoted by Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief Craig Gilbert:

"97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this. But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu."

(If one out of every 30 car rides ended in a fatality, I think we can be fairly certain we would be shutting down our highways.)

He went on: “Getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population (and) I think probably far less.”

It sounds fine until you work out the actual numbers. If 40%-70% of the United States population were to get the virus, as experts have suggested might be the case in an unchecked pandemic, that works out to 4.5 million deaths at the low end, nearly 8 million deaths at the high end.

Or, to rephrase that sentiment: I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, says Gen. Buck Johnson. But I do say no more than 5 to 8 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

That does not sound nearly as comforting as Dr. Senator Sociopath was perhaps attempting to sound, but reassuring constituents has never been among his better skills. He is more comfortable on the Dear Leader side of the party.

As the rest of the interview makes clear, Johnson is getting extremely antsy about the widespread economic shutdowns now necessitated after incompetent leadership and a near-total collapse of government testing efforts allowed the virus to spread, unchecked and undetected, throughout the nation. We "need to really understand the costs of potentially going too far here," he explained. "But nobody knows what too far is."

This is true. I'm going to guess that if more than 4 million Americans die in the next 18 months, that is probably going to be considered by survivors as not far enough. One million: Probably still on the not-good side. On the other hand, we have temporary economic collapse. However, it would have been nice if early and rigorous testing had isolated the virus to a few well-defined hotspots, but that particular poop ship has sailed.

So here we are, then. What precisely would count as the "too far" number of non-deaths in American towns and cities is something that our nation's top lawmakers and government officials will no doubt have to consider during the coming weeks.

Ron Johnson will be among them, for reasons known only to the voters of Wisconsin. God help them (and us) both. If it speeds things along, we could have every United States senator and House member write down their own preferred “target deaths” number now, so we have a negotiating point to start from. But one of the big problems becoming apparent here is that “3.4 percent of those who contract the virus will die” is not being translated into raw population numbers, either in individual American towns or in the nation as a whole.