Coronavirus deaths in the United States over the next few weeks will steadily rise to almost double their current daily rate to some 3,000 by the end of the month, a U.S. administration document states, even as President Donald Trump urges states to reopen their economies, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The estimates in the document, obtained by the Times, are based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and project some 200,000 new cases daily by June 1, up from approximately 25,000 currently.
The projections are confirmation of public health experts’ main concern that a reopening of the economy will mean that cases will increase so quickly in some areas of the country that the health care system will become too overloaded to treat all the patients.
Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said that social distancing did not work as well as hoped, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that “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.”
Although Trump has acknowledged that deaths in the U.S. will be twice as much as he predicted just two weeks ago, his new numbers significantly underestimate what his own administration predicts the total death toll to be by the end of the month, not even including the fatalities after that date.
Even as previous coronavirus hot spots in New York City, New Orleans and Detroit have shown improvement, other urban centers have reported a steady growth in cases, as have parts of rural America that were largely spared in the early stages of the pandemic.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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