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WH advisor offers new projection: US coronavirus deaths may be 'more like 60,000'

Thursday, 09 April 2020 8:07 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 09 April 2020 8:26 PM ]

Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks on NBC News' Today Show

US leading expert on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says that around “60,000” may die from the coronavirus pandemic in America.

The final toll currently "looks more like 60,000," a smaller number than that of what was predicted previously, Fauci said on NBC News' Today show on Thursday.

Fauci, a key member of the White House's coronavirus task force, said, "this is going to be a very bad week," but added, “there are some glimmers of hope,” citing the stabilized number of people being admitted to hospitals in New York.

"The number of deaths and the cases that we're seeing right now are really validating what we said, that this is going to be a very bad week, on the one hand…On the other hand, as you can see there are some glimmers of hope, particularly when you look at the situation in New York — where the number of hospitalizations, requirements for intensive care and intubation over the last few days have actually stabilized and [are] starting to come down."

Back in March, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said "between 100,000 and 200,000" people in the US could die from COVID-19.

So for, more than 455,000 have tested positive for the virus and 16,114 have died across the United States, according to worldometers.info.

Nearly 2,000 US coronavirus deaths for second day in a row

The United States recorded nearly 2,000 novel coronavirus deaths for a second day in a row, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

New York, the epicenter of COVID-19 in the country, has now more than 150,000 cases and in spite of a recent spike in deaths there, Fauci said the state is somehow flattening the curve.

"I don't want to jump the gun on that," Fauci said, "but I think that is the case."

"I think we are really looking at the beginning of that, which would really be very encouraging. We need that right now."

This comes as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Thursday complained about the federal government’s handling of the crisis.

“How confident am I of federal responsibility and action? Not that confident,” Cuomo said.

He said that the $2 trillion federal relief bill does even less for his state than he believed.

On Thursday, the number of COVID-19 deaths in New York reached a daily record for the third straight day with 799 fatalities.

Cuomo also compared the economic and humanitarian crisis in New York to the Sept. 11, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

“9/11 was so devastating, so tragic, and then in many ways we lose so many New Yorkers to this silent killer,” Cuomo said, “that just ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11.”

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