“Days after Pres­i­dent Trump said he hoped the coun­try would be ‘opened up and rar­ing to go’ by East­er, he instead announced on Sun­day an exten­sion of fed­er­al guid­ance on social dis­tanc­ing until the end of April, in a con­tin­ued effort to slow the spread of the nov­el coro­n­avirus,” report Ian Dun­can and Feli­cia Son­mez for The Wash­ing­ton Post. The two-page doc­u­ment, “15 Days to Slow the Spread” [pdf], issued on March 16, expires Mon­day.

In the morn­ing, “Antho­ny S. Fau­ci, the White House advis­er, said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ that mod­els sug­gest the virus could cause between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths and that mil­lions of peo­ple could be infect­ed. But he stressed that the 200,000 fig­ure was a worst-case esti­mate that is unlike­ly to come to pass,” added Dun­can and Son­mez.

The pres­i­dent appeared pleased with that pro­jec­tion.

In the Rose Gar­den on Sun­day, Trump com­pared those num­bers favor­ably with the more than 2 mil­lion deaths fore­cast as a worst-case sce­nario had the nation not tak­en strict mea­sures to respond to the virus. If coro­n­avirus-relat­ed deaths remained under 200,000, he said, “we all togeth­er have done a very good job.”

While Trump did not indi­cate where he got the 2 mil­lion esti­mate, The New York Times report­ed on March 13 that based on a pro­jec­tion that showed that between 160 mil­lion and 214 mil­lion peo­ple in the Unit­ed States could be infect­ed over the course of the epi­dem­ic, it could result in 200,000 to 1.7 mil­lion deaths.

Dr. Deb­o­rah Birx, an Oba­ma-era appointee who pre­vi­ous­ly served as the U.S. glob­al AIDS coor­di­na­tor, appeared on Meet the Press ear­li­er in the day, and also con­veyed a grim mes­sage to lis­ten­ers. “This is the way pan­demics work,” she told host Chuck Todd in response to his not­ing that it only took three days for deaths to dou­ble to 2,000.

“No state, no metro area will be spared” from the expect­ed surge in hos­pi­tal­iza­tion expect­ed from COVID-19, she said. “We are ask­ing every sin­gle gov­er­nor and every sin­gle may­or to pre­pare like New York is prepar­ing now.” 

“The virus con­tin­ued to rage in Europe on Sun­day, with Spain report­ing a record dai­ly death toll of 838,” add Dun­can and Son­mez. “Italy, which has the sec­ond-largest num­ber of coro­n­avirus cas­es [after the U.S.], report­ed a dai­ly death toll of 756.”

What’s ahead

How­ev­er, one pub­lic health expert pre­dict­ed that U.S. dai­ly deaths are on track to exceed that num­ber.

Ashish Jha, direc­tor of the Har­vard Glob­al Health Insti­tute, who had told CNN’s John King last Sun­day that by this time, the U.S. would have jumped from being third in COVID cas­es to num­ber one, con­veyed anoth­er chill­ing pro­jec­tion.

“I was wrong – we got there (num­ber one in case­load) in four days. So we’re mov­ing much faster than any of us had pre­dict­ed. I think every part of the coun­try is going to see expo­nen­tial growth in cas­es. 

“I’m real­ly wor­ried about the num­ber of deaths. We’ve dou­bled it in 3 days. If that tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, we are going to be at 10,000 with­in a week, and that at some point, we’re going to see thou­sands and thou­sands of peo­ple dying every day.”

Jha appeared on MSNBC after the pres­i­dent announced the exten­sion of the guide­lines. Asked by host Kasie Hunt to com­ment on Fau­ci’s esti­mate of up to 200,000 COVID deaths in the U.S., he respond­ed:

“Those are grim num­bers. It was com­plete­ly unnec­es­sary, but here we are, and look­ing for­ward, if we do a good job social dis­tanc­ing and increas­ing test­ing and get­ting our hos­pi­tals ready, yes, that is with­in the range we should expe­ri­ence.

“That is com­plete­ly a hor­ri­bly high number…But I’m hop­ing that this press con­fer­ence marks a turn­ing point where everybody begins to take this seri­ous­ly.”

Relat­ed in Plan­e­ti­zen: