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Originally published at RogueGeopolitics.com
On April 30, CIDRAP published a handy, broad-based scenario guide for what the rest of 2020’s pandemic might look. It broke the future into three scenarios: a “peaks and valleys” scenario, a “Spanish Flu 2 massive wave” scenario, and a “slow burn” scenario — all of which still seem viable right now.
I can’t go into the epidemiology of the three scenarios and how accurate they might be; that’s really someone else’s job. But what I can do as a political risk analyst is tell you how the US is likely to react to each of the three scenarios.
Scenario 1: Peaks and Valleys, localized lockdowns and interruptions, and a potential end of the Trump presidency
So in ‘Peaks and Valleys’, the country keeps having April-like waves of infections and deaths. They do get smaller over time, but that’s not much of a silver lining: time and again, America faces hospital shortages and death spikes.
This scenario means that we are likely to see lockdowns of some kind continue in reaction to waves that overwhelm hospital systems. Unlike the panic of March, it’s not as likely to be national; governors will probably enact lockdowns only as another crushing waves becomes inevitable. Localized travel bans are likely…
