White House coronavirus task force response coordinator Deborah Birx predicted the United States could witness anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 deaths from the virus even if U.S. citizens follow the safety guidelines to near perfection.
Birx, a world-renowned global health official, delivered the grim forecast during a Monday morning interview on NBC’s Today show.
“In the flu models, the worst-case scenario is between 1.6 million and 2.2 million deaths,” she said. “That’s the projection if you do nothing. So we’ve never really done all of these things that we’re doing. We’ve put them into a model. We’ve looked at the Italy data with their self-isolation, and that’s where we come up with if we do things together well, almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities. We don’t even want to see that.”
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Birx later noted that in a best case scenario prediction, U.S. citizens would be doing “100%” of “what is required,” but she said, “We’re not sure based on the data that you’re sharing from around the world and seeing these pictures that all of America is responding in a uniform way to protect one another.”
She also warned that cities and states that do not issue stay-at-home orders could cause the virus to spread further and push the death toll even higher.
As of Monday morning, there have been more than 143,000 coronavirus cases in the U.S., 50,000 more than any other country, according to Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, there have been approximately 2,400 deaths in the U.S., according to CNN.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the coronavirus death toll projections are a “moving target,” but the U.S. could see between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths from the virus.
“There are things called models, and when someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good and as accurate as your assumptions,” Fauci told CNN’s State of the Union, adding that he would predict up to 200,000 U.S. deaths and “millions of cases.”
