Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx expressed guarded optimism about America’s ability to reduce the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic.
Fauci, who is the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pushed back on the projected death toll during a Monday White House news conference.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force predicted last week that between 100,000 and 240,000 people would die during the pandemic if proper mitigation measures were implemented. Without mitigation, the death toll could rise to between 1.5 million and 2.2 million.
“I don’t accept every day that we have to have 100,000 to 200,000 deaths. I think we can really bring that down,” Fauci said Monday, noting that he was “cautiously optimistic.”
“If we do what I’ve been talking about over the past few minutes, we can make that number go down,” he said.
Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, also expressed hope at the briefing, saying she “doesn’t accept” that the United States is resigned to those numbers and that the nation can save lives by continuing the measures in place.
“I think Dr. Fauci and I both strongly believe that if we work as hard as we can over the next several weeks, that we will see potential to go under the numbers that were predicted by the models,” Birx said.
Also during Monday’s briefing, President Trump pointed out the number of COVID-19 tests that have been conducted across the country.
“We have more cases because we do much more testing,” the president said. “So, when you do the testing, you have cases. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know about the cases. People sit home, you don’t know about it. But we have now done 1,790,000 tests nationwide — that’s more than any other country in the world.”
