Daily US Times: An influential model is predicting a catastrophic winter with a significant rise in coronavirus deaths while President Trump’s comment again went against the comment of Dr Fauci.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington says in its latest forecast says a possible scenario sees 415,090 Covid-19 deaths by January while the worst-case scenario is 600,000 deaths by January 1.
IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray told CNN: “When we look ahead into the winter with seasonality kicking in, people becoming clearly less vigilant, you know mask use is down, mobility is up in the nation, you put all those together and we look like we’re going to have a very deadly December ahead of us in terms of toll of coronavirus.”
The model is essentially predicting the death toll will double in the next four months. Nearly 6.4 million infections have been recorded in the US as of Friday and more than 192,000 Americans have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Despite the dire prediction, President Trump says the US has done “really well” in fighting the virus, according to a Thursday video on the White House official Facebook page.
The US President said: “I really do believe we’re rounding the corner and the vaccines are right there, but not even discussing vaccines and not discussing therapeutics, we’re rounding the corner.”
While speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday, the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said he does not agree with the President’s statements.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said: “We’re plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day, and the deaths of around 1,000.”
He said test positivity is increasing in some regions of the country and people are spending more time indoors because of cooler weather.
“That’s not good for a respiratory-borne virus,” Dr Fauci said, adding that “You don’t want to start off already with a baseline that’s so high.”
Fauci’s disagreement with that comment is another example of a member of the White House coronavirus task force and a top scientist publicly disputing the President’s claims about the virus.
On Friday, Fauci told CNN: “We’re in a very politically-charged atmosphere now and whenever you’re trying to get people all together singing from the same tune and doing the same things as a society, unified against this common enemy — this virus — it’s very difficult to do that when you have such a charged atmosphere that we have right now.”
“And that really is truly unfortunate,” he said.
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