"So you’re talking about 2.2 million deaths. 2.2 million people from this. If we can hold that down as we’re saying, to 100,000..."

"... it’s a horrible number — maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000, we altogether have done a very good job. 2.2, up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that? I’m feeling very good about what we did last week.... [Easter] was just an aspiration.... Easter... could be a peak period... We had an aspiration of Easter, but when you hear these kind of numbers and you hear the potential travesty, we don’t want to do anything where, you know, we don’t want to have it spike up. We don’t want to do it soon and then all of a sudden you go down, you’re coming down, and then you start going up again, because we discussed that could happen, and we don’t want that to happen. We’ve gone through too much....  I said, 'It would be a great thing if we could do it by Easter,' and we know much more now.... Unfortunately, the enemy is death. It’s death. A lot of people are dying, so it’s very unpleasant. It’s a very unpleasant thing to go through, but the level of competence, the level of caring, the level of love, I just think it’s brilliant and it’s possibly happening in other countries, possibly. I don’t know, I can’t speak to other countries, but I can speak to the United States of America, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I am very proud to be your President."

Said President Trump, at yesterday's coronavirus transcript.

2.2 million is a number — a number of deaths — that the experts were citing in the task force discussions. The continuing lockdown is portrayed as an effort to keep the number down to 100,000 deaths. You can see that when Trump said 100,000, he paused to declare that a "horrible number," because it is horrible to hear now, but 100,000 compares favorably to 2.2 million, which is the number he was told would die if we did nothing. As Trump put it:

[B]efore we heard the 2.2 million people... we had a lot of people were saying maybe we shouldn’t do anything, just ride it. They say ride it like a cowboy. Just ride it. Ride that sucker right through. That’s where the 2.2 million people come in. Would have died maybe, but it would have been 1.6 to 2.2, and that’s not acceptable, but there were a lot of people that said… I thought about it. I said, “Maybe we should ride it through.” You know you always hear about the flu.... You’ll have 35, 36, 37,000 people die, sometimes more, sometimes less. This is different....

Ride it like a cowboy. Just ride it. Ride that sucker right through.... That was the alternative. Ride it like a cowboy... to 2.2 million deaths.

Perhaps the metaphor of the cowboy came from the notion of getting — as quickly as possible — to "herd" immunity. But we are not cattle.