NY Times Reports Trump Admin Privately Projecting 3,000 Daily Deaths by June — White House Disputes

The New York Times published a piece stating that the Trump administration is privately projecting 3,000 daily deaths due to the coronavirus outbreak by June 1. But the White House is disputing the report, claiming “This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed.”

The projections are based on an internal report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that forecasted about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May. There are currently 25,000 cases reported every 24 hours, with a daily death toll of approximately 1,750.

This report comes as states begin to open up, implying that these reopenings could put the U.S. back to where it was in March, which is when stay-at-home orders began. President Donald Trump has also been pressing for states to reopen, despite his administration’s predictions of a steady rise in coronavirus cases and deaths going into the summer.

The White House pushed back on The Times’ reporting, and insisted, “This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed.”

This is not a White House document nor has it been presented to the task force or gone through interagency vetting. This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the Coronavirus Task Force or data that the task force has analyzed. #COVID19 https://t.co/mTK0724Mzp

— Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere45) May 4, 2020

The health of the American people remains President Trump’s top priority and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions.

— Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere45) May 4, 2020

The steep count of 200,000 predicted new cases has also met skepticism from FiveThirtyEight Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver, who asked, “Why are reported deaths in this slide so different than projected deaths?” in a Twitter post:

Projecting ~200K new detected cases each day **by the end of the month** from a current baseline of ~30K is also a LOT, even with quite pessimistic assumptions. I would encourage some caution with taking these at face value.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 4, 2020

Yeah, could also be: someone wants to scare Trump out of touting re-opening, so they’re releasing some sort of worst-case scenario or conjectural scenario and it’s being portrayed as the base case.https://t.co/dO8uFcdxX5

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 4, 2020

I don’t know, but I think the lack of context in NYT’s reporting on this is regrettable. There are some things in that document that don’t make much sense on the surface, and maybe they have good explanations, but we don’t have many explanations at all.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 4, 2020

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