CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta on NY Times Reporting CDC Projection of 3,000 Daily Deaths: It ‘May Be Even Higher’
American deaths linked to the coronavirus could exceed 3,000 daily by mid-summer, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta said on Monday, because shutdowns aimed at reducing the spread of the virus failed to create a “back end” to the infection curve.
Gupta was responding to a question from CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, who asked, “If we take this number 3,000 of deaths a day or 200,000 coronavirus cases a day, does that even factor in these next couple of weeks of states reopening?”
He replied, “I think it was really interesting to me when I looked at the University of Washington model … that was starting to go up without even factoring in the reopening. So there was already the sense that … for whatever reason, maybe people weren’t being as diligent about staying at home, even in places where they should have been. We don’t know what the reason is. But even before reopening, the numbers were already starting to creep up.”
Gupta said deaths were rising even before accounting for partial reopenings around the country. “This is not taking into full account the dozens of states that are reopening. So, again, I take no joy in saying this, but I think that the numbers that we’re looking at, as stark as they are, may be even higher in terms of the projections once we start to take into account all these states opening. And we want to avoid that explosive growth that we saw in mid-March.”
A document from the Centers for Disease Control estimated deaths will reach approximately 3,000 daily by June 1, according to a Monday report in The New York Times, as well as 200,000 new daily cases. Presently, there are about 1,750 deaths and 25,000 new cases each day. The White House objected to the document in a statement, saying it is “not reflective” of modeling performed by the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
The University of Washington on Monday revised its model to predict 135,000 total coronavirus-linked deaths in the U.S., up from an earlier estimate of 72,433.
Gupta said stay-at-home orders around the nation failed to be as effective as officials had hoped. “Mitigation efforts, the stay-at-home orders, have had an impact. But seemingly what they’ve done is, they’ve brought things down to a lower level of daily infections. It did not sort of create this back end of the curve that we were sort of thinking would happen, that we would be able to contain this. It just got this slowing down to a certain level. So it had an impact, but not as great an impact as we hoped.”
Watch above via CNN.
