THE WHITE House predicts the daily number of coronavirus deaths will double by June as President Trump continues to push to reopen America, a leaked memo reveals.
Trump’s administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of deaths over the next several weeks, hitting around 3,000 deaths a day – or 90,000 a month – by June 1, The New York Times reported.
The predictions are based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and forecast around 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May, an increase from the current 25,000 a day.
So far, there have been more than 1.6 million cases in the US, and 67,795 people have died.
On Sunday, Trump said the development of a COVID-19 vaccine is “far ahead of any vaccine ever in history,” and added it would be ready by the end of the year.
Speaking with Fox News’ Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum inside the Lincoln Memorial, Trump also said the US death toll could reach 80,000 to 90,000 – up from the 60,000 figure he’d stated in recent weeks.
Praising his team’s response to the virus, Trump said: “That’s one of the reasons we’re successful, if you call losing 80 or 90,000 people successful.”
When asked why his prediction had gone up, he said: “I used to say 65,000 and now I’m saying 80 or 90 and it goes up and it goes up rapidly.”
Later in the town hall, Trump went higher: “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.”
But he said had he not shutdown the country, the US would have lost “a million two, a million four, a million five, that’s the minimum. We would have lost probably higher, it’s possible higher than 2.2.”
A handful of states in the US have already started to ease restrictions, despite the number of coronavirus cases continuing to rise across the country.
In Georgia, one of the states with the most rapid reopening plans in the nation, the daily death rate has jumped.
More than 100 people were reported dead on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, up from 20 deaths on Saturday and Sunday – a five-fold increase.
This surge in deaths came days after Governor Brian Kemp made the decision to reopen some parts of the state against the advice of medical experts and even the president himself.
In a bid to restart the local economy, restaurants, hair salons and other businesses opened up on Friday 24 April.
None of these deaths would have been caused by the state’s reopening on Friday due to the time it takes the infection to sicken patients and ultimately kill them.
However, the reopening could result in a catastrophic death toll in two to three weeks.
It also means Georgia had not flattened the infection curve ahead of the reopening.
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