Pence on Whether Coronavirus Deaths Will Surge After Infections Spike: ‘Our Hope and Our Prayer’ is They Won’t
Vice President Mike Pence said Friday it was “our hope and our prayer” that deaths related to coronavirus would not surge along with a rise in infections.
“Do you expect the death rate to go up in the next three or four weeks, like we are seeing the rate of infection go up now?” Pence was asked during a coronavirus task force briefing on Friday.
“Our hope and our prayer is that’s not the case,” the vice president replied.
“We’ve seen a precipitous decline in fatalities,” Pence added. Calling the statistics a “testament” to health care workers, he noted, “The fact that two months ago we had lost 2,500 Americans in a single day — in two days this week, we lost less than 300 Americans.”
Coronavirus infections have surged this week in at least 30 states, including Florida, which hit a single-day record for new infections on Thursday with 8,942 new confirmed cases. As of June 26, total cases in the United States stood at 2.5 million. There had been 127,000 deaths related to the virus, making the survival rate around 95 percent.
While urging caution for older Americans, Pence said officials were hopeful that the fatality rate wouldn’t worsen because many of the new cases were being contracted by younger Americans who do not have preexisting conditions. “Roughly 2.5 percent of all of our losses took place in people under the age of 25,” Pence said. “In each case, or at least 90 percent of the cases, they were people with preexisting conditions, underlying conditions, that contributed to the sad outcome.
“So, as we see that in Florida and in Texas, they have reported to us that half or even more than half of the new cases that are showing up every day are people under the age of 35 or younger,” he added, noting that “most cases” were asymptomatic. “Our hope is that those younger, healthy Americans, like most have already, will continue to go through the coronavirus, [and] will recover.”
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