Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb acknowledged that measures taken to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in the United States were not as effective as public health experts had expected.
“When you look across the country, it’s really a mixed bag,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “Certainly, cases are falling in the tri-state region around New York City, but when you back out what’s happening in New York … around the nation, hospitalizations and new cases continue to rise. There’s about 20 states where we see a rising number of new cases.”
He continued, “While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected. 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.”
NEWS: There are about 20 states where cases are rising on a daily basis, @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan, saying that mitigation wasn’t as effective as anticipated. “While mitigation didn’t fail… it didn’t work as we expected,” he says pic.twitter.com/nT6oqDhxAM
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 3, 2020
Gottlieb added that the “persistent spread” of the coronavirus despite federal social distancing guidelines and state stay-at-home orders could mean a “new normal” of 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and more than 1,000 deaths per day through the summer.
“I think when you look out to the end of June, it’s probably the case that we’re going to get above 100,000 deaths nationally,” he said. “We may be facing the prospect that 20,000, 30,000 new cases a day diagnosed becomes a new normal. And 1,000 or more deaths becomes the new normal as well. Right now, we’re seeing for about 30 days now, about 30,000 cases a day and 2,000 deaths a day. And if you factor in that we’re probably diagnosing only 1 in 10 infections, those 30,000 cases are really 300,000 cases.”
Coronavirus death toll projections in the U.S. have shifted during the pandemic. The White House initially estimated around 100,000 to 240,000 U.S. deaths from the illness, but that projection was later lowered to around 60,000. President Trump last week indicated that the death toll could reach 70,000, and Dr. Deborah Birx on Sunday repeated the administration’s initial projection.
As of Sunday, the U.S. had reported nearly 1,140,000 coronavirus cases and more than 66,000 related deaths.
