The creator of a top U.S. coronavirus model warned of a resurgence if social distancing guidelines around the country are eased on May 1.
As some advisers to President Trump advocate for a push to reignite the struggling economy next month, Christopher Murray, the director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said premature easing of restrictions meant to stem the spread of the virus could have disastrous effects.
“The first testing we’ve done on this is if you opened up the entire country May 1, then we would very clearly have a rebound,” Murray said Sunday on CBS News’s Face the Nation.
“We don’t think the capability in the states exists yet to deal with that volume of cases. And so by July or August, we could be back in the same situation we are now. I think what Dr. Fauci was talking about this morning is that different states are on different timings,” he added. “And so maybe some states can open up mid-May. But we have to be very careful and make sure that we don’t sort of lose all the effort that the American people have put into closures by premature opening.”
The model overseen by Murray was used by the White House to predict at the end of March between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the United States from the virus, with mitigation.
By last week, the IHME model was forecasting the virus would kill as few as 60,000 people, suggesting social distancing has been working.
The U.S. death toll surpassed that of hard-hit Italy on Saturday, and reached more than 22,000 people by Monday morning, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. There have been more than 557,000 confirmed cases.
There are signs that the worst of the crisis is over. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted it would be a “bad week,” after which there would be a turnaround thanks to social distancing measures that drove down new hospitalization rates.
Calling it one of the “toughest” decisions he’ll ever make, Trump told Fox News over the weekend he will make a decision “reasonably soon” on an effort to promote the reopening of wide swaths of the economy.
