Virus may kill 200,000 in US: Top scientist
WASHINGTON: Senior US scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci issued a cautious prediction on Sunday that the coronavirus could claim as many as 200,000 lives in the US, as state and local officials described increasingly desperate shortages in hard-pressed hospitals.
And with stress, uncertainty and exhaustion rising across the country, House speaker Nancy Pelosi squarely blamed US President Donald Trump for unnecessary loss of life by initially playing down the pandemic.
“His denial at the beginning was deadly,” she told CNN’S State of the Union. She added, “Don’t fiddle while people die, Mr. President.”
Dr. Fauci, who leads research into infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, played down worst-case predictions of one million or more deaths, instead offering a rough estimate of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths and “millions of cases”.
But Fauci, a leading member of Trump’s coronavirus task force and for many Americans a comforting voice of authority, quickly added, “I don’t want to be held to that ... It’s such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.”
By way of comparison, a US flu epidemic in 2018-19 killed 34,000 people.
Covid-19 has hit the US with explosive force in recent weeks, following a path seen earlier in parts of Asia and Europe. It took a month for the US to move from its first confirmed death, on February 29, to its 1,000th. But in two days this week that number doubled, to nearly 2,200 on Sunday.
“This is the way pandemics work, and that’s why we all are deeply concerned and why we have been raising the alert,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House task force, said onsunday. “No state, no metro area will be spared.”
In the US, the epicentre has been New York City, with 672 deaths so far. Hospital staff have issued desperate pleas for more protective equipment.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that his city’s hospitals have enough protective equipment for only another week. He said he had made a direct request to Trump and the US military “to find us immediately more military medical personnel and get them here by next Sunday”.
De Blasio credited federal officials with being “very responsive”, but added that “we’re talking about a sharp escalation ahead”.
In Washington state, where the disease first struck with force, governor Jay Inslee described “a desperate need for all kinds of equipment”. He said the nation needed to be put on an essentially wartime footing.
Inslee pushed back against the notion, advocated earlier by Trump, that the country could begin returning to work by Easter, which is April 12.