WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump warned Americans to brace for a “hell of a bad two weeks” ahead as the White House projected there could be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the U.S. from the coronavirus pandemic even if current social distancing guidelines are maintained.
Public health officials stressed 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.
Added Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, “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 the country would soon see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in a pandemic that in the United States has infected about 190,000 people and killed more than 4,000, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said.
The White House figures assume that Americans follow the rigorous social-distancing guidelines set out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the stricter “stay at home” restrictions set by many governors across the country. Still, the White House was not looking at a nationwide order.
“We live in a nation that has a system of federalism, and the governors get to make the decisions,” Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, told NBC’s “Today” on Wednesday. “But we’re gonna give them the best possible guidance we can, and that’s to stay at home and to social distance.”
“This is going to be one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country,” Trump said. “We’re going to lose thousands of people.”
The jaw-dropping projections were laid out during a grim, two-hour White House briefing. 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 behaviors. Each of our behaviors, 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.”
Birx said pandemic forecasts initially predicted 1.5 million to 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. But that was a worst-case scenario, without efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus through social distancing. She added that states that have not yet seen a spike in cases as New York has could take action to flatten the curve of rising hospitalizations and deaths.
It’s not only social distancing that could make a difference but also the frantic efforts by hospitals around the country to prepare for an onslaught of seriously ill patients. The better prepared hospitals are, the greater the chances of lives being saved.
There’s also a wild card when it comes to treatment: whether the experimental drug combination Trump has touted — a medicine for malaria and an antibiotic — will actually make a difference. That combination is already being used on thousands of patients, and Fauci said he would want to see a rigorous test of its effectiveness.
