He said this after the number of coronavirus deaths in the nation doubled in little more than a week, giving the United States the horrid distinction of posting the highest body count of any nation on earth by far. We will soon lose more people to the novel coronavirus than all the Americans killed in the Vietnam War.

Trump’s open-for-business cheerleading will cause many more deaths. Even Robert Redfield, Trump’s whipsawed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that Trump’s tweets about “liberating” states now on medical lockdown were “not helpful.” These are code words for crazy.

Given that Trump is an alpha-male simpleton with no filter, it’s never difficult to find the true motive behind his tactics. As he has said, he wants all the authority and none of the responsibility. If we lose a quarter-million Americans, it’s the fault of governors running their respective shows. If the number is far less, it’s because he took charge.

He’s against vote-by mail, the least life-threatening way to allow Americans to exercise their most basic constitutional right, because “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

He’s encouraged life-threatening demonstrations. What’s particularly galling is using children as props in those protests, endangering their health.

Who wouldn’t love to bring back the buzz and vigor of normal life? I miss everything, from the Neapolitan pizza joint to my perpetually losing baseball team, to hugs and high-fives, even security lines at the airport. I wish we were getting close to herd immunity, when a large enough percentage of the population has contracted the disease that it nearly stops the spread.

I was initially encouraged by the studies out of California that, though flawed, showed through antibody tests that the number of people who may have contracted the coronavirus was far greater than the official tally of confirmed cases. This would indicate that the actual mortality rate is much lower than the body count.