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Projections from an internal report show that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.
The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.
"There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow," the C.D.C. warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways with cases rising so rapidly that the health care system is overloaded.
"While mitigation didn't fail, I think it's fair to say that it didn't work as well as we expected," Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump's former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. "We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we're just not seeing that."
On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago.
"We're going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people," he said in a virtual town hall on Fox News. "That's a horrible thing. We shouldn't lose one person over this."
Mr. Gottlieb said Americans "may be facing the prospect that 20,000, 30,000 new cases a day diagnosed becomes the new normal."
Some states that have partially reopened are still seeing an increase in coronavirus cases, including Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas, according to Times data. Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska and Arizona also are seeing an increase in cases and are planning on some kind of reopening soon. Alaska has also reopened and is seeing a small number of increasing cases.
While the country has stabilized, it has not really improved, as shown by data collected by The Times. Case and death numbers remain stuck on a numbing, tragic plateau that is tilting only slightly downward.
At least 1,000 people with the virus, and sometimes more than 2,000, have died every day for the last month. On a near-daily basis, at least 25,000 new cases of the virus are being identified across the country. And even as New York City, New Orleans and Detroit make gains, other urban centers, including Chicago and Los Angeles, are reporting steady growth in cases.
The situation has devolved most dramatically in parts of rural America that were largely spared in the early stages of the pandemic. As food processing facilities and prisons have emerged as some of the country's largest case clusters, the counties that include Logansport, Ind., South Sioux City, Neb., and Marion, Ohio, have surpassed New York City in cases per capita.
New York Times, May 4, 2020
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May 4, 2020
Voices4America Post Script. Trump's incompetence has taken 67,000 lives so far. Never Forget that this level of death and devastation did not have to happen, and #LyingTrump knows it is about to get worse thanks to his "Liberation" movement. Share it!
