Trump: Following guidelines a matter of life and death
President Donald Trump warned Americans to brace for a “hell of a bad two weeks” ahead as the White House projected that there could be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States from the coronavirus pandemic, even if current social distancing guidelines are maintained.
Public health officials stressed on Tuesday that the number could be less if people across the country bear down on keeping their distance from one another.
“We really believe we can do a lot better than that,” said Dr Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White
House coronavirus task force.
That would require all Americans to take seriously their role in preventing the spread of disease, she said.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said: “This is a number that we need to anticipate, but we don’t necessarily have to accept it as being inevitable.”
Trump called it “a matter of life and death” for Americans to heed his administration’s guidelines and predicted that the country would soon see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in a pandemic that has infected about 190,000 people and killed about 4,000 in the United States, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said.
“This is going to be one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country. We’re going to lose thousands of people.”
The jaw-dropping projections were laid out during a grim, twohour White House briefing on Tuesday.
Officials described a death toll that in a best-case scenario would likely be greater than the more than 53,000 American lives lost during World War I.
And the model’s high end neared the realm of possibility that Americans lost to the virus could approach the 291,000 Americans killed on the battlefield during World War II.
“There’s no magic bullet,” Birx said.
“There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviours – each of our behaviours, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic.”
Fauci called the numbers “sobering” and urged Americans to “step on the accelerator” with their collective mitigation efforts.
“We are continuing to see things go up,” Fauci said.
“We cannot be discouraged by that because the mitigation is actually working and will work.” — AP