US virus toll tipped to surge
The Trump administration is privately projecting that up to 3000 people will soon die each day from Covid-19 – a significant increase on current figures – even as the US president urges states to quickly re-open their economies.
The leaked projections from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emerged as Donald Trump acknowledged that the total US death toll could reach 100,000 – far higher than the estimates he has cited in recent weeks.
Just hours later, the University of Washington experts behind the country’s mostwatched coronavirus model announced a dramatic increase in their projected US COVID-19 death toll. The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation model now projects that almost 135,000 people will die from the coronavirus in the US – up from its previous estimate of 72,433 deaths.
More than a dozen US states moved to ease strict restrictions on commercial and social activity yesterday, joining large states like Texas and Georgia that recently re-opened significant portions of their economies.
The CDC, according to a presentation obtained by The New York Times, forecasts that the US will be recording 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May – a massive increase from 25,000 cases currently.
‘‘There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow or are in an elevated
‘‘This data is not reflective of any of the modelling done by the task force or data that the task force has analysed.’’
Judd Deere
White House spokesman
incidence plateau, including in the Great Lakes region, parts of the Southeast, Northeast, and around southern California,’’ the CDC analysis says.
The US has averaged 1870 deaths a day from the coronavirus over the past five days, meaning 3000 daily deaths by June would be a significant increase.
After the publication of the documents White House spokesman Judd Deere said: ‘‘This is not a White House document nor has it been presented to the
Coronavirus Task Force or gone through interagency vetting.’’
‘‘This data is not reflective of any of the modelling done by the task force or data that the task force has analysed.’’
In a Fox News town hall event on Sunday night, Trump said: ‘‘We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people.
‘‘That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person over this. This should’ve been stopped in China.’’
Public health experts have expressed growing disappointment that the number of new cases and deaths in the US has not declined as quickly as they had hoped.
‘‘While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,’’ Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said in an interview with CBS on Monday.
‘‘We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.’’
While the daily death figures have fallen rapidly in New York, which has been the epicentre of the US outbreak, they have been rising slowly in other parts of the country.
Texas reported 50 deaths last Friday, its highest daily number of Covid-19 deaths since the pandemic began.
In his Fox News town hall, Trump said: ‘‘I think most of the numbers are coming down. We’re on the right side of it, but we want to keep it that way, but we also want to get back to work. The people want to get back to work.’’
He said he was convinced that the US economy would be ‘‘moving again’’ by early summer.
‘‘I think we saved millions of lives, but now we have to get it back open, and we have to get it back open safely but as quickly as possible,’’ he said. – Nine