As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks. The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.
The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, significant risks remain. And reopening the economy will make matters worse.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system was overloaded.
[See the internal report.]
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “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.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago. But his new estimate still underestimates what his own administration is now predicting to be the total death toll by the end of May — much less in the months to come. It follows a pattern for Mr. Trump, who has frequently understated the impact of the disease.
Obviously, he still is, even though “his numbers” are increasing.
But as I wrote this morning. I don’t think they really care anymore. Dana Bash on CNN says Chris Christie told her that we need to accept the fact that there are going to be mass casualties because we need to open the economy.
You may have noticed that other countries have not found themselves in this position. The worst hit like Italy have started to improve. But here’s something to note:
Our supposed “lockdown” was erratic and inconsistent. And most importantly, they didn’t use the time to prepare properly for a re-opening by securing medical equipment, testing and contact tracing, so it was basically a waste as far as getting the country ready for the long haul — and creating conditions that could actually bring the economy back. What they are doing will not work.
They are sabotaging their own goals. And apparently, they are just too stupid to realize it.