The United States is "much better prepared" to handle the COVID-19 pandemic, but there could be a "sustained period" of at least 1,000 daily deaths as the virus continues to spread, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said.
Gottlieb was on CNBC Tuesday morning and discussed the pandemic, which has infected 9.5 million Americans and has killed more than 237,000.
"We're probably going to see significant spread across the entire United States in a confluent epidemic that we're much better prepared to deal with, so I don't think that we're going to see the excess death that we saw with the first wave of this pandemic when it struck New York," Gottlieb said.
"But the sheer fact that we're going to be infecting so many people right now is probably going to mean that the death tolls get well above 1,000 for a sustained period of time."
The number of overall coronavirus cases and the number of active cases in the U.S. have taken off in recent weeks, but deaths from the virus have hovered around 1,000. Hospitals, however, could soon be overwhelmed with patients, Gottlieb said.
"It's going to be a concern," he told CNBC. "There'll be parts of the country that get very pressed, and the challenge is that because you have a more diffuse epidemic across the whole country you're not going to be able to back stop that many local regions that have very dense epidemics."
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