Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that the Trump administration has always known the coronavirus is more infectious than the flu.
“We have known from the beginning that this is at least 3 times more contagious than the flu,” Pence said during Thursday’s White House briefing. “And, I believe that fact alone has informed our projections and the modeling.”
Pence was responding to a question from a reporter who cited a study suggesting that the coronavirus is much more contagious than originally projected, with a much higher R0, pronounced R-naught, or rate at which the virus reproduces and infects other people, than previously thought.
Pence’s comments, though, stand in contrast with those of President Trump, who early in the pandemic likened the coronavirus to the flu.
“It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner,” he said in a February press briefing. He has since said that it is more deadly.
Dr. Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force response coordinator, said Thursday that the rate of contagion is actually much lower than the projected rate thanks to mitigation measures such as social distancing and self-quarantines.
Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci added, “You know what the worst enemy of an R-naught is? Physical separation.”
The growth rate of new hospitalizations is beginning to level off, though the rate of deaths is growing. Fauci said earlier in the week that the death toll would grow but that lower admissions to intensive care units and rates of intubation were signs that there would soon be a turnaround.
Earlier Thursday, Fauci said on Today that the projected number of coronavirus deaths “looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000.”
The number of new cases has surpassed 461,400, and at least 16,478 people have died. The number of new cases each day from Saturday to Monday was lower than usual but increased dramatically on Tuesday by about 32,800, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
