Vice President Pence said the spread of the coronavirus would likely prove less severe than some early forecasts projected, as a Monday deadline self-imposed by President Trump to decide on whether to reopen portions of the country approaches.
Early models are “now being understood to have been really wrong,” Pence said in a Friday CNBC appearance. “We’re really following the data here: ,n terms of the infection rate that we’ve seen, what we know of China, the data from South Korea, from Italy, from other places around the world.”
Pence added: “The truth of the matter is that it does appear to be significantly lower than a lot of the projections were.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, a top public health expert detailed to Pence’s COVID-19 task force who is coordinating the administration’s response, said models predicting significant virus transmission did not match “reality on the ground.”
“Models are models,” Birx said in the Thursday briefing. “When people start talking about 20% of a population getting infected, it’s very scary, but we don’t have data that matches that based on our experience.”
Among the models the White House reviewed were projections by a group of Harvard infectious disease epidemiologists, who gave them a range of potential outcomes based on models of dozens of different scenarios under different assumptions and parameters.
The president insisted this week that the public is eager to return to work and told governors in a letter Thursday that the White House was working up new guidelines that would determine risk levels around the country based on data.
States have experienced different rates of infection, and the administration has suggested new social-distance guidance might be tied to these levels. “We may take large sections of our country that are not so affected and do it that way,” Trump said on Thursday.
“We are at an early stage. Some places are maybe in the process of arresting [the COVID-19 epidemic] at that early stage. Maybe. That remains to be seen,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who participated in a group teleconference convened last week by the administration. “But comparing South Korea or China or Singapore at this stage to some hypothetical future stage in an uncontrolled epidemic is just, you know, comparing apples to Blue Jays.”
The president’s upbeat assessment of Easter as a potential date when people could resume normal life and abandon restrictions, first made in a Fox News town hall on Tuesday, was quickly tempered by advisers insisting that any decisions would be guided by data.
One question the White House had was about local variation, Lipsitch told the Washington Examiner. “Different types of models can answer different questions,” he added.
“Our model isn’t on a local scale. It’s on a national scale. So, it couldn’t do anything intelligent about that,” Lipsitch said. “But there are lots of people in different parts of government trying to get information and trying to act rationally. I just, it seems like there are some other countercurrents that I don’t really understand.”
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci has been circumspect in interviews about the virus and its spread.
“To be honest, we don’t have all that data now uniformly throughout the country to make those determinations,” Fauci, who is on the White House coronavirus task force, said in an interview with NPR on Thursday. “But that’s a major, primary goal that we have right now, is to get those data because you have to make informed decisions, and your decisions are informed by the information you have.”
The administration said 552,000 tests had been performed and completed by Thursday evening. With the signing of the CARES Act on Friday, all labs and testing facilities are now required to report results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
