Yes, that’s right.

Jiminy Cricket. So what Gov. Walz is saying is “acceptable” would be the equivalent of the Feds saying that over one million dead in the US!

Very reasonable question! Minnesota has only 1.7% of the national population, so, however many people are going to die nationally, we should only have about 1/50th of that, tops!

Dr. Fauci’s comment in his interview was very short and off-the-cuff, so it’s hard to know what was in his head.

However, from context and from knowing what Dr. Fauci is generally looking at every day, I believe that Dr. Fauci’s 100,000-200,000 dead estimate is based on the assumption that the country will adopt a nationwide suppress/test/contain strategy, instead of the mitigation strategy Gov. Walz supports.

If a mitigation strategy were adopted nationwide instead, we would expect to see over a million deaths nationwide. 2% of that is about 50,000, right in line with Walz’s explanation for Minnesota.

So the dramatically different death estimates are, I believe, based on the fact that Gov. Walz and Dr. Fauci are making different assumptions about what our anti-coronavirus strategy is going to be.