In a task force briefing, the White House offered the first look at the statistical models being used to anticipate how the virus could spread across the U.S.
On Monday, the White House coronavirus response coordinator warned that the U.S. could see up to 200,000 deaths from the outbreak “if we do things almost perfectly.”
On Tuesday, the coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, showed how her team came up with the grim projection.
In a task force briefing, the White House offered the first look at the statistical models being used to anticipate how the virus could spread across the U.S. and what drove President Donald Trump to extend his administration’s nationwide social distancing guidelines until April 30.
Epidemiologists, who study the spread of infectious diseases, rely on data collected about diseases combined with statistical analysis to create predictive models of different outcomes to figure out how best to deal with outbreaks. A model developed by researchers at Imperial College London and published March 17 suggested that without any mitigation measures in place, the coronavirus could kill 2.2 million people in the U.S.
That’s an entirely hypothetical scenario, because it assumes that all government agencies would ignore the virus and would take no steps, such as social isolation, to reduce its spread. Nonetheless, the stark findings were reported to have been among the first to prompt U.S. authorities to take drastic action.
According to Birx, the latest figures from the White House came from combining the Imperial College London model with a half-dozen other models from leading epidemiology teams around the world.
The projections unveiled Tuesday suggest that the pandemic could kill 100,000 to 240,000 people in the U.S. by mid-June, even with strict mitigation measures in place over the next 30 days.
Trump called the estimated death toll “sobering.” He said the weeks ahead will be challenging as new cases multiply and deaths mount.
Denise Chow – NBC News – March 31, 2020.
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